


two hands digging in each other’s wounds

by michirukaioh



Series: the lucky ones [1]
Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Character Growth, F/F, Found Family, Gen, I have a lot of feelings, Other, Post-Game, abby calls lev 'kid' a lot, because i'm a sucker for ragtag groups of misfits, eventual happy ending after a lotta slow burn, hate to friendship to ??????, i just want abby to have good things and i want lev to have good things, i want ellie to find herself again, rating is mostly for language!, redemption arc, sometimes i think about the parallels of abby/lev and joel/ellie and cry hbu, tlou ii SPOILERS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:53:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 74,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25130428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/michirukaioh/pseuds/michirukaioh
Summary: { it's spiraling down; biting words like a wolf howling }abby needs something to believe in, lev needs a place to call home, and somewhere along the way, the past they've been running from is bound to catch up to them.
Relationships: Abby & Lev, Abby/Ellie, Abby/Ellie (The Last of Us), mentions of abby/owen, mentions of ellie/dina
Series: the lucky ones [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914454
Comments: 331
Kudos: 887





	1. "this is abby from long beach."

* * *

* * *

_it's spiraling down_

_biting words like a wolf howling_

* * *

* * *

The lighthouse on the harbor had been boarded up – probably since before the outbreak. A few windows had been busted out and the interior was used as a base for some cult that Abby Anderson didn’t believe any longer existed. Long abandoned, it served its purpose as a home – or, more specifically, the closest to a home as they were probably going to get.

It had a beat-up radio hooked to a generator, and Abby was always telling Lev, however naively, foolishly, that they would receive a transmission one day that meant the Fireflies were looking for them. After all, that’s why they’d made the trek from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. It was closer to Catalina Island; it was closer to the end-goal that she was beginning to believe had never really existed in the first place.

She wanted to believe that Owen had been right, that the Fireflies really had been reuniting in Santa Barbara – that it wasn’t all an elaborate trap set by the Rattler gang to lure in victims with too much hope flickering in their eyes.

Maybe, _maybe_ , Abby just wanted something to believe in.

She and Lev were growing into a comfortable pattern with one another – almost a routine of sorts. He liked to cook, liked to hunt up on the hills a few miles away. He was fascinated by birds and Abby told him stories about the kites she used to fly with her dad when she was still a child.

“I think we could make one,” she had told him one night, the two of them sitting across from one another with a fire flickering between them. “Owen—” she swallowed down the acid that formed on her tongue, “—he used to make them all the time back on the base. A long time ago.”

“Before the Wolves,” Lev finished for her, a pebble weaving between his fingers.

“Before everything, yeah.”

Sometimes at night, Lev would wake up to Abby screaming, kicking in her sleep. Other times, it was Abby bringing him back down to reality, away from the nightmares about Yara’s lifeless, bloody body and his mother in a heap by the kitchen table.

 _You are my people_ , she had told him once, when the world had been on fire and they had been drowning in the flames, and she had meant it.

It doesn’t take long to become a family when it becomes so glaringly apparent that you’re all the other has left. Unless – _unless_ – she can find the Fireflies, can regroup with the people her father had put so much of his faith and heart and soul behind. Lev could make friends his own age, they could feel camaraderie for the first time in a long time.

The Catalina Island promise aside, there had to be others out there. The Salt Lake group that had joined the WLF were not the only remnants – they couldn’t be. She remembered being a child and listening with wonder as Marlene commanded rooms of people. Marlene’s promises for a safe future for all weren’t for nothing, and she knew that deep in her bones.

She wanted Lev to have that sense of security that she had growing up – and that was more security than she knew she could offer him on her own.

They had reached out to the Catalina Island numbers station a few more times after arriving in Long Beach, but they hadn’t answered, the calls turning into nothing but static over the airwaves.

“ _This is Abby from Long Beach_ ,” has all but become her catchphrase by the time she is flicking the radio switch off of the mic for what must have been the hundredth time.

“2425 Constance,” she mutters under her breath. “What a joke. What an easy fucking way to get trapped.”

“You followed your gut, Abby,” Lev’s voice broke through the otherwise quiet room. “You told me it’s important to do that, even when it’s scary.” He rocks back on his heels, leaning against the curved wall. “It’s not like we could stay in Seattle.”

“Fuck Seattle,” Abby bites back, dragging her hands across her face before resting her eyes against her palms. “Fuck this place, too.”

She pushes away from the wall. “I’m gonna head out for a bit. Look for supplies.”

Lev’s arms cross and uncross from over his chest, moving to stand beside her and giving her an affirmative nod, a no-questions-asked nod. “I’ll grab my bow.”

Abby shakes her head back at him. “Listen, kid, you barely got any sleep last night. Which I know because I know everything. You hang back. I got this.”

Deep down, she knows that it is probably because she needs this. She needs these moments to herself, to be alone with her negative and ugly thoughts. Thoughts of her dog in a pool of blood, Lev hanging from a pole looking like a skeleton with skin, Owen and Mel and Manny and Nora and her _dad_ and—

It’s the only time she allows herself to wallow, to grieve and mourn.

And in all honesty, she knows that Lev needs that, too.

* * *

When she returns that night, backpack hanging heavily on her shoulders, she’s surprised to see Lev writing things down in a rush in front of the radio. “Thank you,” he says quietly, confidently, as he flicks the mic switch and turns back to Abby. “I think we found them.”

Her bag drops to the floor, and she’s crouched beside it, pulling out first aid materials and extra ammo. She doesn’t meet his eyes as she speaks. “Found who?”

“What do you mean _who_?” he blinks back at her in momentarily disbelief. “You _know_ who. _Them_. The Fireflies.”

She blanches for a moment, turning to face him with invisible dog ears perked all the way up. “They responded?”

“No,” he shakes his head, gesturing to the list of comm numbers by the desk. “Not Catalina Island. A place in Texas. Galveston Island. I wrote it down.” He shoves the paper at her, and her knees buckle almost then and there when she sees the names of people she never thought she’d see again.

_Colby R. – 000232_

_Nicole H. – 000201_

_Erik G. – 000111_

“Kid, how did you find all of this?” she asks incredulously, handing the paper back to him. “How long have you been _looking_?”

“Since we got here,” he replies, scratching at the back of his neck. “I didn’t want to say anything until I really, um, _knew_ anything. I kept calling the numbers on the transmission sheet from Constance, and nobody replied until somebody did. And they gave me another number, and that number gave me another number, and…” A shrug of his shoulders and he’s looking back down at the paper. “It’s a lead, right?”

“Kinda seems like it might be more than a lead,” she says, standing beside him and looking down at the paper. “Pretty impressive, Lev.” Understatement.

“Learned from you,” he says as if this is nothing, but she can see the blush spreading across his cheeks. “What do you think?”

She looks around the walls of the lighthouse that they’ve called home for the last six months. “I think we might need to go Texas.”

“Yeah,” Lev’s voice is trickling with hope and he hands her the crumpled-up map they found at a gas station when they arrived here from Santa Barbara. It’s covered in circles and scribbles, x-markings and Abby’s notes in the margins. “Where is Texas?”

The simple question brings her back to an aquarium in Seattle, to pointing out the shape of California at Yara’s hope-fueled question.

She looks at Lev for a long second before she’s looking back at the map and pointing. “A long way from here.”

Lev trails his finger along the crinkled paper before landing just along the east coast of the state, right along the water. And there he reads one word. 

“Galveston.”

* * *

She hasn’t missed traveling, hasn’t missed how her body feels permanently aching and tired from long stretches of road and grass and infected lurking around hollowed out buildings and rest areas.

Lev keeps the map in his pocket, crossing off the small names of each city as they pass through it. Before they left, he circled areas on their route that had the most interesting names, and even if it meant going a few hours off course, Abby didn’t mind the pit stops. That’s all her life felt like anymore – pit stops, rest areas before picking up and moving onward.

So, if Lev wanted to see a place called Death Valley, who was she to stop him?

He had a circle around Death Valley before they got there, and by the time they’d left, the circle had turned into skull and crossbones, the word _HOT_ scrawled out beneath the sketch. They proceeded onward, through the desert of Nevada with the promise of seeing the Grand Canyon at the end of the trail.

"My dad always said he wanted to take me,” Abby tells Lev when they can see the dilapidated Las Vegas skyline in the distance. “He said that even the infection couldn’t stop the beauty of it. It’s supposed to be one of the seven natural wonders of the world.” She presses the pad of her finger to the name _Grand Canyon National Park_. “Once we get out of the city here, it’s gonna be a lot of desert and a lot of mountains.”

“Like Death Valley desert?” he asks bleakly.

She folds the map up, tucking it back into the pocket on Lev’s bag. “God, I hope not.”

* * *

At one of the Salt Lake Crew’s outposts, Abby had found a guidebook on Nevada – specifically, the book was on sightseeing in Las Vegas. One of her old crewmates, an older guy named Jack, said that he liked to hang onto the book as a memento of the old world, a keepsake of what the world once was and hopefully could someday be again.

The city before her and Lev right now, the one that was crumbling and overgrown, tall, dark buildings standing around them like menacing, decaying monsters, is nothing like the pictures from Jack’s guidebook. It is nothing but a shell, a hornets’ nest for the infected.

“This is like that place in Anaheim with the castle,” Lev points out, the two of them swiftly moving through the shadows around the street corners. He rips down a flyer for a show that was to take place on August 4, 2013 at a hotel called Planet Hollywood. He carefully folds it up and tucks it into the backpack beside his map.

Since they left Long Beach, Lev has been accumulating souvenirs in the same way that Abby always grabs state quarters. He has a keychain in the shape of mouse ears from the ruins of a theme park in Anaheim, a discarded car key from Palm Springs, a journal left behind near Death Valley, and now a flyer from Las Vegas. They have barely taken a couple steps forward before he’s picking a quarter up off of an escalator handrail and passing it to Abby. “It’s for New York.”

She bumps his shoulder with her own, laughing quietly under her breath. “Thanks, kid.”

They creep along hollowed out corridors in abandoned hotels, being mindful to not take out every infected on their way so to not exhaust themselves before they’ve found shelter for the night. Lev snags a map of the Las Vegas strip from a booth on their way between the Bellagio and Caesars Palace, marking off each place as they pass them and making notes of where the infected have been lurking in some places more than others.

She doesn’t know when he became so observant, so comfortable in positioning himself right beside her, a loyal comrade and the only family she has left. She feels a swell of pride sometimes, just from looking at him, from seeing how much he’s grown and changed over their brief – but long, so long – seventeen months of knowing one another.

Lifting his head, Lev locks eyes on a group of… of _people_ up ahead of them. A small cluster, sitting near a crumbling, statuesque fountain near Caesars Palace. They have rifles and shotguns sitting along the marble ledge, but they don’t seem to be in any hurry to grab them.

That is, of course, until they spot Abby and Lev in the distance.

“Got your bow?” Abby asks quietly, as if Lev isn’t already reaching for it. She has her hand resting on the gun in her holster, ready to pull it out the second the moment seems appropriate.

One of the women at the fountain reaches for her rifle, standing up and marching closer to Abby and Lev. “What’s your business here?”

“Passing through,” Abby points out definitively, nodding her head toward Lev before looking warily back at the woman in front of them. “Just finding a place for the night and then heading out.”

The woman looks tired, worn down and bleary-eyed. She holds the face of someone who lived long before the outbreak began, eyes wrinkled in the corners, skin papery and tanned like leather. “Where you from?”

“California,” Abby clips back to her. “Seattle before that.”

Her eyes quickly darken, making note of Lev’s scars for the first time. “ _Seraphites_.”

“Wolf,” she corrects her, removing her hand from her gun ever so carefully. “Former. At this point I think we’re probably just classified as travelers more than anything else. I’m Abby, this is Lev. We don’t want any trouble. Just want a place to sleep.”

“We’re Fireflies,” Lev adds on, saying the name that Abby never calls herself these days.

The woman shifts her eyes away from Lev just long enough to take in Abby’s appearance – her tired face, her scarred shoulder, her short, messy hair and her toned arms. It’s a look she’s seen before, more times than she can count. It’s the silent question, the moment of _“Could I take her in a fight?”_ that always ends with a resounding _no_. Her eyes are back to Lev, and then back to Abby.

“Treasure Island’s the only place that we’ve cleared out top to bottom,” she points out, nodding to a hotel behind them, one with a giant pirate ship up front that makes Lev’s eyes light up. “We’re working our way down the Strip. Hitting up the Mirage and Caesars next.”

Abby peers around her to the group along the fountain. There can’t be more than five of them, each looking just as miserable as the last. “Just you?”

She shakes her head. “Group of us. ‘Bout fifty or so. Call ourselves The Oasis. I’m Connie, back there is Tim, Yolanda, Greg, and Rhett.”

“This isn’t a trap, right?” Lev’s voice startles Abby, but only for a moment or two. “We’re not going to get to Treasure Island and get the shit kicked out of us by a horde of blind demons, are we?”

Connie looks back at him, long and hard, a question raised in her eyes but never brought to fruition.

“He means infected,” Abby points out.

Connie nods, hiking her thumb back toward the fountain. “Yolanda came from the Scars,” she points out, and from the corner of her eye, Abby watches Lev in worry. He merely swallows the slur down like salt water, eyes fixed pointedly at his beat-up sneakers. “The kid can believe that all he wants, but you’ll just have to see for yourself.”

Abby scoffs. “Very reassuring, thanks.” She looks back to Lev, bumping his shoulder with her side. “We’ll take ‘em down if they’re there, yeah?”

Lev squints up ahead at the pirate ship before looking back at Connie, and eventually back at Abby. “Yeah,” he says unsteadily. “Okay.”

* * *

Connie and The Oasis, thankfully, hadn’t been lying.

Abby approaches the old building, takes in the pirate ship at the front that looks like it’s hanging by a thread, the grass crawling up the sides of the hotel, debris burying the main doors and banning them from entry. Lev nudges her shoulder, pointing toward a shattered window along the end of the angular building. The wooden planks near the ship creak with each step and Abby kicks some shards of glass aside, keeping an eye on Lev all the while. It has become a pattern of hers, checking on him – after what happened to Yara, the thought of losing track of Lev for even a second keeps her up at night, asleep, but never fully under. Always keeping an eye out.

Lev keeps his bow poised in hand, just in case, but Abby guides him toward the window, folding her hands together so that he can climb up and into the second floor. He reaches a hand out to help her in, knowing that she of all people does not need the extra boost. Placing her hands flat on the windowsill, she hoists herself up and inside. The hotel room is worn down, beat up and overgrown with the echoes of so many footsteps walking these floors before them. She nods toward the door that leads to the hall, and the two of them take their time patrolling the area, checking rooms for infected like a bad habit.

There’s a balcony that overlooks the downstairs, ghosts of slot machines and blackjack tables staring back at them. Lev furrows his brow, bending across the balcony as if that will give him a better look. “What are those?”

“They’re for gambling,” Abby explains. “Like when those guys in Los Angeles tried to teach you how to play poker.”

He frowns. “The guys that wanted me to bet the squid I caught?”

“Exactly. This whole city used to be dedicated to shit like that. You stick coins in those machines,” she points down at the slots, “and try your luck that you’ll win more money from it.”

“What a waste of quarters,” he mutters flatly before wandering off down another hallway and toward one of the more put-together rooms on the floor. He jiggles the doorknob a few times before it opens with a groan, the two of them heading inside and dropping their packs on the ground.

Lev almost instantly finds solace in one of the two beds, mumbling something about “just resting my eyes” before he is dozing off.

Abby sits on the edge of the bed next to Lev’s, but she knows that she won’t sleep the way that she needs to. She has hardly slept since they left Long Beach over a week ago. She has hardly slept in a year. When she does, it’s more like passing out into unconscious, her body too spent to keep its eyes open any longer. She likes it better when she falls asleep like that, better than the alternative of going to sleep in the fear of the nightmares that will follow her – and oh, they do. They always do.

She sees her dad on the hospital floor, she sees Manny with a bullet flying through his skull, she sees Mel’s belly and Owen’s lifeless form. She sees Nora beat to a pulp, Joel Miller beat to a pulp, Yara turning into nothing more than a heap of bullet holes and blood. Ellie with a knife to Lev’s throat, Ellie’s face going fuzzy under the water. Rattlers carving lines into her stomach, Seraphites stringing her up, shamblers grabbing her by the shoulders. Whatever the fuck that monstrosity was at the hospital.

Lev sleeps soundly beside her, but Abby knows that nothing good comes of slumber.

Not anymore.

* * *

She does sleep, eventually, but only a little. Only enough to become acutely aware of the sun peaking through the windows from behind her eyelids. Lev is already up and around, positioning his bag back on his shoulders and rustling with the map in his hands. He had picked it up when they’d first crossed into Nevada a couple days ago, looting it from a corpse in the Amargosa Valley and he’d been hanging onto it like a lifeline ever since.

Abby sits up, rubbing at her eyes and pushing herself up against the headboard. “What time is it?”

“Early,” is Lev’s response before he’s heading back toward her, sitting down on the edge of the mattress and placing the map flat down between them. He points just past Las Vegas. “There’s some water this way,” he tells her. “I don’t think they have a well around here, and we only have a couple swigs left.” He gestures toward the canteen sitting on the nightstand between their beds. “If we leave soon we can—”

Abby cuts him off with a dry laugh, folding the map up and handing it back to him. “This is incredibly proactive of you,” she points out with a small smile. “We’ll head out in a few.”

Lev nods, standing from the bed and moving back toward the window, peering out at the desolate city sprawling in front of them. “We should’ve stayed in the pirate ship,” he points out, and Abby can’t even come up with a sound argument.

* * *

There are Oasis members sitting along the pier as they make their way back out the window they’d entered the night before. A few of them watching with wary eyes as Abby and Lev make their way past them.

“Which way you headed?” one of the men asks, and Lev points past the hotel, past the end of the Strip. Up ahead is a building that all too closely resembles the Space Needle back in Seattle.

He follows Lev’s point before turning back to them. “Not cleared out that way. Might be dangerous.”

“We can handle it,” Abby replies, tone short and dismissive. “Thanks for the heads up about Treasure Island.”

She nudges Lev forward, but the man’s voice stops them once more. “You could stay, you know. We’re a growing community. Have a whole trading post down by Excalibur.”

“We need to be hitting the road. But thanks.”

Lev is watching them from over his shoulder as Abby charges ahead, out into the crumbling streets and onward past the Strip.

Her eyes are fixed on the building up ahead of them, the one that seems like a painful mirage of another lifetime. She can tell from the way that Lev is tense beside her that he notices the similarities. His gaze drops back down to his beat-up shoes and out of instinct, Abby is reaching forward, dropping an arm around his shoulders and squeezing firmly. “Just think,” she points out, “the sooner we make it past that place, the closer we are to the water, yeah?”

He nods, holding tightly onto the straps of his backpack.

They push onward.

* * *

“We need to find another place with fruit,” Lev points out, eyes squinting against the bright Nevada sunlight. “Or somewhere we can fish.”

He’s right, of course. The two of them hadn’t had anything stable to eat in a few days now, and they had been too sidetracked by the infected residing between the broken lights and hollow walls of the Las Vegas Strip to properly focus on scoring a meal for the night.

"Let’s get out of the city and then we can see about finding anything that resembles breakfast.”

Back when they had been living on a beached sailboat in Santa Barbara, Abby had promised Lev that they would find somewhere that had chickens so that she could make him scrambled eggs the same way her dad used to make them for her. To this day, she hasn’t been able to make good on her word.

It’s not a long walk to the Stratosphere, the needle-like tower looming over the rest of the skyline, a busted sign at the front of the building reading STRATOSPHERE in burnt out white letters.

Lev is snagging onto the back of Abby’s shirt, sending her towering frame staggering backwards for a moment, before they can reach the hotel. “Demons,” he whispers, and he’s nodding his head toward the run-down building across from them that reads FUN CITY in bubbly letters.

He’s crouching against a newspaper box before Abby can get a word out, stringing an arrow into his bow. Abby keeps her eye on him for only a moment before she’s looking at the sight in the parking lot across from them.

Clickers are screaming, jerking their way out of the building as runners and stalkers circle the abandoned vehicles. Their heads jerk back to give a battle cry before they are lunging forward, in search of their prey. A window shatters, a shambler staggering out of it. All of them, all the monsters, are going after one silhouette amidst the chaos. A clicker screeches in defeat as an arrow is lodged through their skull, and the silhouette moves swiftly between vehicles.

"We need to help,” Lev is declaring in the same breath that Abby is pointing out, _“Better them than us.”_

Lev glowers at her, shaking his head. “No, not _better them than us_ ,” he repeats her words. “We’re helping.”

Abby is reaching for him, ready to drag him all the way past the Stratosphere if she has to, but Lev is skirting out from under her arm, diving across the street and ducking behind an old tour bus. He peers around the corner, drawing his bow and sending an incendiary arrow into the parking lot, straight into the shambler’s shoulder.

The sound of the arrow crackles and cries as the shambler bellows out in anger, and as it turns to make a beeline for Lev, Abby is racing across the street and readying her crossbow, sending another arrow into him. Pipe bombs intermingle with the flames of a Molotov cocktail from the victim in the parking lot, sending the infected bursting like fireworks.

Abby and Lev move closer, firing more and more rounds until the monsters around them are crumbling to the ground one by one. The lithe frame of the girl in the parking lot is dropping trap mines and firing off rounds with her own arrow until there is no one left. Just Abby and Lev amidst the rubble.

…and _her_.

Abby spots the unmistakable vines crawling up the girl’s wrist, a harsh black against pale skin. And then she sees the short auburn hair, the fury in her eyes as she meets Abby’s gaze.

Ellie.

Lev freezes, dropping his bow back to his side, and Abby feels trapped. She is in a theater laced with bombs and gunshots. She has her head underwater, the last breaths trickling out of her in angry, terrified gasps. She is looking at the body that used to belong to Owen but now belonged to the Earth. She sees Joel Miller bloodied and damaged and _dead_.

Ellie.

Ellie, who sees her too, whose jaw tightens like a lock before she is taking off running, sprinting around the building like a coward who can’t face her reality.

A mirage, surely.

“Let’s go,” Abby points out gruffly, but Lev is moving in the opposite direction, moving after Ellie. “Lev, let’s _go_.”

“She’s bleeding,” Lev shakes her hand off his arm. “We’re not leaving her.”

Abby sees Ellie’s blade dragging along Lev’s throat every night. “Yes. We _are_.”

But Lev is racing forward, away from her, cutting through the corpses of clickers and runners on the pavement beneath his feet. He is diving around the corner, diving after Ellie.

And all Abby can do is run after him.

* * *

* * *

* * *


	2. two fucking fingers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ellie has found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time - and nobody, and i mean nobody, is surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is this chapter 2 or chapter 1.5? time will tell.

* * *

* * *

_cold smoke slipping out of colder throats_

_darkness falling leaves nowhere to go_

* * *

* * *

Ellie hadn’t made it far from the farmhouse – from her _home_ – before the reality of the situation, the reality of her world as she’d known it, all came crashing down on top of her.

She’d lost Dina. She’d lost JJ. She’d lost the two good things she had left, and for _what_? What did she gain from watching the light almost flicker out of Abby Anderson’s eyes? It didn’t bring Joel back. It didn’t bring Jesse back. It didn’t make her feel any better. In fact, all it did was make her feel worse. Like a monster. Who the _fuck_ held a knife to a kid’s throat?

Who the fuck killed a pregnant woman? Slaughtered an entire city to get to one person who wouldn’t offer her any sense of redemption or closure or vengeance?

If she didn’t get out of her head soon, she was going to lose her mind. She was going to explode. Every bad thought that she had ever held was bubbling up to the surface as she made the familiar trek from the farmhouse they’d found on the borderline of Idaho and Wyoming back to Jackson.

She replayed every conversation she’d had with Dina. Every kiss to her shoulder. Every time their little spud had giggled and giggled and _giggled_. She tasted copper on her tongue at Dina’s words, at Dina’s promise to her that she wasn’t going to do this again. And Ellie hadn’t listened. Ellie had left on a death march that would ultimately leave her with two less fingers than she’d had when she started the journey in the first place.

She knew what she had to do. She had to go to Jackson. She had to make things right.

After all, it was all she had left.

* * *

“I love you,” Dina told her, hands cupping her cheeks more tenderly than Ellie deserved. “I love you so much, Ellie.” Just as quickly, the warmth pressed to her face was gone. Dina’s hands were falling back to her side, and she was taking one, two, _three_ steps back. Further into Jesse’s family’s home and further away from Ellie.

From inside, she could hear JJ’s laugh bouncing off the wall. It took everything she had in her to swallow down the lump forming in her throat. “Why do I feel like you’re about to add a ‘but’ to that sentence?”

Dina looked tired. Her eyes weren’t shining the way they used to. Her gaze was on the floor for a few long moments before she looked up, looked back at Ellie. “I _love_ you,” she repeated so softly. “But I can’t.”

A blow to the head would hurt less.

“D, please—”

Dina took another step back even though Ellie hadn’t moved closer to her. Or had she?

“I’m worried about you, Ellie.”

Ellie shook her head quickly, and it was at that moment that she knew for a fact that she was moving closer toward her. “You don’t need to be,” she promised her, voice trembling off a cliff. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. I… this is where I belong. _You_ are where I belong.”

“You lost two fucking fingers over this, Ellie,” Dina countered. “I _know_ what losing Joel did to you. What losing Jesse did to you. Tommy gave you an ultimatum and it was fucked up and dirty and _wrong_. But you let it get to you. You let _her_ get to you. And this is a rabbit hole I can’t follow you down.”

The tears were stinging the corners of her eyes now, and she didn’t even try to blink them away. There wouldn’t be a point. “Dina—”

“—I need you to look out for you,” Dina cut her off. “I need you to figure out what you want. What’s going to bring you _back_. You deserve peace, Ellie. But, so do I. I have someone else to worry about now. And… and do you know how it _felt_? To have you walk out that door back then? To not know if I’d ever see you again?”

Ellie swallowed down another hollow apology.

“I will be here,” Dina promised her, but the promise didn’t stick the way Dina’s promises usually did. “I will always be here. And JJ will be here. But…” she bit her lip, pushing tears away from her eyes. “But I need you to do what you need to do.”

“I came back,” Ellie whispered.

“Yeah,” Dina’s voice was light. Empty. “For now.”

This time, it was Ellie who was staggering back a step or five. “Okay,” she said. She finally allowed herself to brush the tears off her cheeks. “Okay.”

It was the only word she could get out as she turned away from the only home she knew for the second time.

* * *

She made a pitstop at Joel’s old house before leaving Jackson. The last thing she wanted was a run-in with Tommy or Maria or, god forbid, Seth. But she couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.

These were halls she had walked so many times over the past five years. She had even carved her name into the bottom wooden step with her shiv just because she could. But the house felt different now. Colder, lacking the warmth of Joel and his off-key humming. She made her way up the stairs, past the half-built guitars, back to the bedroom where she had said her final sendoff to Jackson, to Joel, to the girl she once was over a year ago.

Her fingers danced along his dresser, unable to bring herself to look at the picture of her and Joel, but pausing on the one of him and Sarah. She was in her soccer uniform, and Joel looked proud. She was about to put the picture back down, but then she was picking it up once more. She slid it carefully out of the frame, brushing across Joel’s face with the pad of her thumb. She wouldn’t cry, not again. Not after everything.

She was about to slide the photo carefully between the pages of her journal, but something on Sarah’s jersey caught her off guard.

Bringing it closer, Ellie examined the photo, reading the words barely legible amongst the worn film: _LONESTAR JUNIOR LEAGUE – AUSTIN, TX_.

It was an epiphany, a rare moment of clarity that hit her square in the chest.

And then she was out the door.

* * *

Kodak’s hooves come to a still as Ellie pulls on the reins just enough that she can hop off, pull the map from her bag and see where exactly she went wrong.

Her plan was simple – make it to Austin, see if the loss of Joel would hurt any less if she had the chance to stand where he’d once stood, to visit his life from almost thirty years prior. It should have been a straight shot from Jackson down to Austin, but she had veered left when she should have veered right somewhere in Utah, and now she is staring at the desolate rubble of a place that used to be known as Las Vegas, Nevada.

“Way to read a map, Magellan,” she mutters under her breath, squinting up at the desolate hotels that she remembers Joel and Tommy talking about so long ago. Joel had told her a story once about coming home from a trip to Vegas with no money, no shoes, and no idea what had happened to make Sarah’s mom _so mad_ at him. They hadn’t made it to Vegas on their trip to Jackson all those years before, but Joel had told her that when she turned twenty-one, he would take her. Even if they couldn’t do a damn thing there anymore. _“It’s the principle, kiddo,”_ he’d told her, _“A rite of passage.”_

 _Well, Joel,_ she thinks to herself, climbing back up onto Kodak’s saddle and letting Maria’s horse (she has so many; surely, she won’t miss one, right?). _I made it._

She’s heard talk of a group forming in Vegas, remembers Tommy and Jesse talking about it back in Seattle. They call themselves The Oasis, and from the look of the spray-painted palm trees along the cracked pavement, she’s pretty sure the rumors were true.

Kodak takes her past a hotel that looks like the Eiffel Tower, and another that looks like a miniaturized New York City. There’s a hotel that looks like a castle from one of those Monty Python movies Joel used to watch with her, and a group of people gathered outside of it. It’s a trading post, a makeshift market, and Ellie leads Kodak straight toward it.

One of the men takes notice of her immediately, and Ellie eyes the rifle slung across his back that he appears to be reaching for.

She jumps off Kodak, holding her hands up in surrender. “I’m just passing through,” she tells them. “I got lost a while back and kind of… wound up here.”

“Who you with?”

“Him,” she jerks her thumb back toward Kodak.

The man observes Kodak for a moment before looking back at Ellie. He has faded scars along his cheeks, like the Seraphites back in Seattle. “Where you headed?”

“Supposed to be Austin,” she scratches the back of her neck. “I shouldn’t be allowed to navigate myself at two in the morning.”

He snorts and it’s the kind of snort that makes Ellie think he doesn’t believe her. “Long fuckin’ way from Austin.”

She glares back at him. “Hence the part where I said I got lost.”

“Guess so,” he mutters, dropping the cigarette he’d had perched between his lips down to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of his boot. “I’m Tobias.”

“El…” the name dies on her tongue. “Eh,” she clears her throat. “Sarah.”

She doesn’t know why she says it. She knows that when she goes to sleep tonight, the name Sarah is going to be soaring around her head like an angry boomerang. Maybe she just wants one day where people don’t look at her and automatically _know_ her. It’s a big world, but it’s never, ever been big enough. And for once, she doesn’t want to be _Ellie_.

“Well, Sarah,” he gestures to the market around them. “Welcome to The Oasis.”

* * *

She is with The Oasis for a few days, helping them clear out the hotel at the end of the Las Vegas Strip called Treasure Island and helping them plan their next plan of attack on The Wynn across the street. It’s nice, she realizes, to not have to think for a while. To just send some bloaters exploding into flaming heaps on the marble tile floors that she’s sure used to be so beautiful. She’s not trying to get anywhere; she’s just trying to beat levels in a video game – one floor after another after another.

The lower levels of Treasure Island were the worst to get through, diving past slot machines and poker tables, playing hide and seek with runners and clickers until each one was cleared out.

“What’s your endgame plan here?” she asks Tobias one night, the two of them having spent the better half of their day taking out the middle floors of the hotel while the rest of the crew cleared out the top half. He’s hardly paying attention to her, a girl with piercings along her face is busy pressing kisses to his tattooed throat, and when he looks at Ellie, it reminds her so much of Jesse. Such an absolute _“why are you ruining the moment?”_ glare that sends a chill down her spine.

He blinks slowly, all dark eyes and long lashes. “To make this place livable, I guess.” He gestures to the group sitting around a makeshift firepit atop the pirate ship parked at the front of Treasure Island. “The Oasis is getting bigger every day. I mean, person by person, so to speak, but bigger every day.” He nudges the girl away from his neck, turning to give Ellie his full attention. “Some of us used to be Fireflies or Seraphites or Wolves, couple Rattlers who got fed up with the bullshit, lotta people just passing through. We just wanna be a fucking refuge, you know? Somewhere where you don’t feel like you have to be on your toes all the time.”

“An oasis,” Ellie nods, looking down at her Converse. The rubber toes are only a few days shy of falling apart, but that is a problem for Future Ellie. Present day Ellie is too tired to think about it.

If she were to be honest with herself, she knows that she could see herself staying here, finding a new pack to call her own.

But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she doesn’t need a pack. Maybe she just needs to be alone for a while, like Dina told her. She needs to figure out what she wants, figure out how to get all the angry voices out of her head.

Austin.

That’s where she needs to be.

She pulls off a piece of her sandwich, biting down and closing her eyes.

She’ll leave tomorrow.

* * *

She never has the same dream twice. Sometimes, it’s about Joel – about the museum he took her to for her birthday, about the giraffes they saw in one of the most surreal moments of her life, about the _motherfucking dinosaur_ she climbed on top of. Other times, her dreams are about Dina, and they’re the dreams that always end with her waking up with tears stinging her eyelids and her clothes sticking a little tighter to her skin. When she’s not so lucky, she sees Joel’s face pressed into the cabin floor. She sees Abby looking gaunt in Santa Barbara and telling her she’s not going to fight her before Ellie is dragging her by her hair into the cold ocean water. She sees Dina pushing her away and begging her to stay, stay, stay at the exact same time. She hears JJ’s laugh, stretching his chubby hands out toward her before being pulled away, forever out of her grasp. She sees Jesse as they pushed through that door in the theater. She hears Tommy’s words ringing around her head, telling her that it’s her responsibility to get justice for Joel, like she didn’t lose him, too. She sees the bodies of the Wolves she killed, each and every one of them, but especially the pregnant woman at the aquarium and the dog that got in her way. She thinks about the kid Abby was protecting in the boat, the knife she held to his throat, and she wakes up retching.

The night before she leaves Las Vegas, she dreams of playing guitar on a beach with her toes in the sand. Her fucked up hand doesn’t stop her from strumming the chords, from singing softly to an old song by The Cure that Joel loved so much. When she wakes up, she hates herself – just for a second – for leaving Joel’s guitar behind at the farmhouse.

* * *

“You sure about this?” Tobias asks her that morning. She already has her bag slung back over her shoulder, weapons newly reloaded with ammo she’s been collecting since she first got into the city.

She nods, pointing toward the end of the Strip, past the Stratosphere and the worn green road sign that reads: VALLEY OF FIRE STATE PARK with the name UTAH on the next line down. “Like I said, this was… out of the way.”

Tobias rakes his fingers through his dark curls. “Always a place for you here if you change your mind. You get shit _done_ ; we’d be lucky to have you.” He blushes a second later, looking over his shoulder. “Don’t let Connie hear me gushin’. She’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

She smiles despite herself, despite the fact that she doesn’t find herself smiling much anymore. She’s about to part ways, bid her final farewells, when a bloater comes busting out of the Mirage, taking out two Oasis members faster than Ellie can blink.

“Shit,” Tobias sputters, dropping his canteen to the ground and reaching to pick up his gun.

Ellie is already three steps ahead of him, grabbing an empty bottle they’d gone through last night when emptying out wine. She slips a rag inside, lighting it up and tossing it at the bloater, finishing him off with one, two, three rounds of shotgun ammunition until he’s crumbling in a loud, wailing mess of incendiary shells and flickering flames.

Tobias looks at her in awe, shaking his head back at her. “Sarah, come on. Now you wanna _bail_? After all _that_?”

Ellie is momentarily taken aback by the name, but then she snorts, brushing her bangs away from where they’re matted with sweat, sticking flat to her forehead. There is a moment of hesitation, a lingered pause with Ellie in the middle, torn between the road to where she needs to go, and the desire to turn her brain off for a few more hours.

“Well,” she mumbles, “can’t necessarily let you clear out the Mirage on your own at this point. I’ll get back here and there won’t be anyone left. And then what? _I’m_ supposed to be the leader? Fuck that.”

Tobias’ smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes, and Ellie shoves him forward, into the hotel and into a new battle.

* * *

It’s late that night when she decides that she still needs to leave. She waits until the others are asleep in the base they’d crafted for themselves near Treasure Island before picking her bag up once again and slipping into the quiet of the night.

Joel used to talk about Las Vegas like it was something so bright, so sparkly. It is none of that now. It is a ghost town, phantom buildings that looked eerie and ominous in the dark. It’s hard to imagine this city ever looking as beautiful as Joel once swore to her it was.

She and Kodak their way further off the Strip, past Treasure Island and the haunted building that looks like a ramshackle circus tent. Up ahead, she can see the Stratosphere. It brings her back to Seattle, back to every bad thing that happened to her only a little over a year before. In three days’ time, she lost Jesse and almost lost Dina. And chasing Abby all the way to California with Tommy’s words echoing in her ear didn’t help a damn thing. At this point, she doesn’t think anything will.

Ellie doesn’t make it far out of the city, the image of the Stratosphere stretching out ahead of her causing her to nearly stop dead in her tracks. She calls herself names, silently, venomously. Calls herself a coward and a monster and a failure. Nothing and nobody can possibly hurt her worse than she hurts herself.

She stops before she can make it past the building, fatigue from earlier in the day catching up to her, sending her to take an early turn in a run-down parking lot belonging to the Fun City Motel. There is a caved-in chapel at the front, pink concrete walls lined with even pinker doors curving around the parking lot.

If she were practical – which we all know she is not – she would leave this parking lot and head back for Treasure Island, get some actual sleep before morning arrives. And yet – and _yet_ – she finds herself leaving Kodak near the back of the motel with a promise of seeing him soon and pushing into a motel room with a peeling, hot pink door. She checks the bathroom, she checks the closet, finds a trading card that’s not yet in her collection wedged under the windowsill and tucks it into her bag.

She falls asleep with her shotgun in her arms only to be awoken with a snarl and a shrill, unmistakable _clllllllllk._

“Son of a bitch,” she mutters under her breath, rubbing at her eyes. She had planned to check the hot water heater this morning, try to maybe get a shower in before she was off on another stupid and fruitless adventure. Fate, very evidently, has other plans for her.

Ellie rolls off the bed, snagging her backpack from where she’d dropped it late last night on the other bed in the room. She braces herself, but only for a second, as she pulls the nightstand away from its rightful place shoved up against the motel room door. Carefully, she opens the door, immediately ducking alongside a car as she watches the infected stumble and stagger their way around the parking lot.

She holds her breath, lacing up her bow and arrow and keeping it poised on a clicker as it wobbles around in a circle, all decaying growths and frustrated shrieks. She releases her breath and releases the arrow at the same time, sending it straight to the target and making for an instant kill-shot.

Moving swiftly, she ducks from one car to the next. The runners’ battle cries ring out through the parking lot, one of the stumbling over the clicker’s corpse and immediately alerting the others. She fires her arrows one, two, three more times, before she’s ducking another corner and dropping a trap mine just a few feet shy of a shambler. Backing away, she reaches for a brick on the ground. A shaky inhale followed by a steadier exhale later, she is sending the brick flying toward a car window, shattering it and swiftly sending an ear-shattering signal to the shambler she was after.

He barrels forward, overgrown arms flailing before he steps directly into her trap and brings a clicker down with him. The clicker explodes, but the shambler carries on – angry and howling, and there is more where they came from.

It’s too many, and she realizes that too quickly.

Stalkers are pouring from the walls, fast and furious and lunging for her. She shakes away from a runner’s grasp as they grab her by the shoulders with their teeth bared. Ellie jumps on top of a car, jumps from one hood to another and sends a Molotov cocktail soaring into the crowd.

She’s only acutely aware that a clicker has been brought down by an arrow that she didn’t fire, but she doesn’t have time to pay attention to that. She dives forward, firing off another cocktail, another round with her shotgun.

A pipe bomb explodes in the distance and she sees limbs blasting across the parking lot. The numbers are diminishing now, and she jumps from the car and races for a dumpster. She takes out the two clickers in front of her and watches as another arrow – and then another – take out the last stalkers and runners.

All that’s left is the aftermath – piles of dead bodies, charred remains of infected, blood painting the parking lot in dark smears and blotches. She stands when she feels the area is clear and her gaze travels across the pavement, to the source of the arrows and the pipe bombs.

A boy, maybe fifteen, with short black hair and faint scars on his cheeks.

Oh. No. Fucking. Way.

She takes a step back on instinct. His eyes are landed on her, and her eyes are on him. But then, just as quickly, they’re on the figure behind him. Toned and tall, dark blonde hair hanging choppily at her shoulders. _“Built like an ox,”_ she can hear Tommy’s words echoing in her ear, but not anymore. Not quite.

Her muscle definition doesn’t look like it ever fully came back from her time with the Rattlers. But ever the same, Abby Anderson and her little fucking lackey are standing across from her. She refuses to give them credit for _saving her_. They’re the reason any of this happened in the first place. Every bad thing that’s happened to Ellie in the past seventeen months can be chalked up to Abby goddamn Anderson. The ghost from her nightmares, the monster under her bed.

Why is she here? _How_ is she here?

She doesn’t have time to think about this, and so she doesn’t.

Instead, she just runs.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't expect to have another chapter up this soon, but the muse is honestly flying right now and i'm so, so thankful for that. (even writing out that fight scene wasn't as terrible as i had been worried it would be?)
> 
> and thank y'all so much for your response so far - it means so much to me ❤


	3. change.  your.  route.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lev's compassion will truly be the death of them all. (or, at least, abby.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have spent so much time on google maps looking at las vegas and surrounding areas at this point that the fbi agent in my computer probably thinks i'm moving to nevada. 
> 
> thank y'all so much for your continued support of this fic, and i hope you enjoy this update!
> 
> p.s. i have made a playlist for this fic while i've been writing it, so if you'd like to listen along, [please enjoy!](https://tinyurl.com/likeawolfhowling)

* * *

* * *

_i’ll wrap up my bones and leave them  
out of this home, out on the road_

* * *

* * *

“Wait!”

“Lev!” Abby shouts in a harsh, quiet way, racing around the corner after him, after where he is still running after Ellie.

Ellie darts into an alley between a coffee shop and a Thai restaurant, and Lev is quick at her heels. “Wait, please, your shoulder.”

She’s not stopping, and Abby remembers even more of the reasons as to why she hates her so fucking much. Because _now_ , Ellie’s problem is becoming Lev’s problem – and Lev’s problems will always be Abby’s problems. She is reaching out for Lev, but Lev is gaining on Ellie, almost toppling backwards when the girl whips around to face the both of them, the nose of a sawed-off shotgun pointed right at them.

“Stay back," Ellie snaps. "Stay back or I swear to _fucking_ God—”

Abby, against her better judgement, heart pounding out a drum solo between her ribs, doesn’t take another step toward her. Instead, she keeps all of her attention honed in on Lev, one hand on his shoulder. Lev isn’t moving.

She doesn’t know where he got this. How he grew to become so _fearless_ , so willing to stare death in the face and say _bring it on_. He’s been bold since she first met him, but it’s something that’s only grown more and more prominent, more _pronounced_ since he lost Yara.

So, when Abby stays back – Lev moves forward, Abby’s hand reluctantly falling in the empty space where he’d just been. He keeps his hands up to show he means no harm, but Ellie doesn’t lower the gun. It hits Abby all at once, hollow and terrifying and sickening, the reality of the situation, Lev with a gun pointed right at him.

Only, it’s not pointed at him. It’s pointed at _her_. And then she doesn’t give a shit — if it’s not pointed at Lev, she _dares_ Ellie to fire it at her. She swallows down, and just as she’s moving to take a step forward (because who the _fuck_ does this brat think she is?), Lev is reaching out for Ellie. He’s cradling her arm between his palms, looking at her shoulder – and the fresh bite mark – in horror.

“Y-your _shoulder_ ,” he whispered, dropping her arm as quickly as he’s picked it up. He looks at Abby with terror in his eyes. “Abby, she—”

“—she’s immune,” Abby retorts, moving the rest of the way toward them and knocking the shotgun right out of Ellie’s hand, sending it to the ground. Her eyes are hard and focused on Ellie, the bitter reminder of _how_ _she knows_ she’s immune pulsing through her brain on a constant playback loop from hell. “Remember?”

“Oh,” Lev breathes out, but he still looks worried. He’s still looking at Ellie with concentration and concern flickering in his dark eyes. More than Ellie deserves. Ellie doesn’t deserve a goddamn thing, least of all from _Lev_. “Does it hurt?”

Ellie’s glowering at Abby, but even she can’t resist Lev’s soft tone – and Abby knows that from the way her face shifts, ever so slightly. Her eyes glance at Lev, and she’s shaking her head in a rigid motion. “It’s fine,” she says shortly. “I’m fine.”

“It probably needs to be wrapped,” Lev points out, and Abby wishes the concrete would split apart and consume them both. She wants to get him away from this area – out of the city, away from _Ellie_ – but Lev is reaching into his bag, he’s pushing around until coming out with some gauze wrap and alcohol. Abby notes the look Ellie is giving him, the way she’s looking at him like he’s insane, like she’s never seen anyone like him before.

 _Don’t you fucking touch him_ , Abby’s plea dances hauntingly around her mind, and she focuses her attention back down to Lev. “Kid, I think she—”

“—Abby,” Lev cuts her off, shooting her a sharp look. “She’s bleeding. She got bit.”

“She’s right here,” Ellie snips back at him, but then she’s looking back at Abby. “Did you follow me here?”

“Are you fucking serious?” Abby snorts, shaking her head in disbelief. “Did I _follow_ you here? I think I’ve made it pretty clear how much I want to do with you.”

Ellie’s jaw clenches, and she nudges Lev’s hand away when he moves forward with the bandaging. And for a moment, they’re just standing there. They’re looking at each other, not saying a word. Ellie’s arms cross over her chest and she rocks back on her heels. Abby notes Ellie checking around for any possible escape routes – she notes this because _she_ is busy doing the exact same thing.

This is the girl who tried to kill her. And not just _once_. Abby saved her, she let her go —twice!— and Ellie returned the favor by killing everyone Abby loved. She followed her down to California to try and finish the job. And now she’s standing here in front of her, and she’s not saying a goddamn word.

“What are you doing here?” Ellie asks. And just like that, Abby wishes that Ellie had kept up with the silent treatment. She’s not telling her shit. “You part of The Oasis?”

“No,” Lev answers for Abby, standing back up from where he’d been busying himself with putting everything back in his pack. “Passing through.”

Abby takes a few steps backwards, silently thrilled when Lev does the same. “Don’t ask where we’re headed.”

“Like I give a shit,” Ellie scoffs, shoving past them and making her way to the horse that’s tied loosely against a telephone pole near the back of the motel, seemingly unfazed by the chaos that has erupted around them as of late. She climbs on top of them, and Lev watches the horse with a thin, nervous curiosity.

Although they could easily find a horse to ride, Abby and Lev find themselves walking more often than anything else. It’s never spoken of, but Lev is uneasy around larger animals. Mystified by them always, but uneasy. Right now is no exception.

Lev takes a step forward, closer to Ellie and her horse and closer to proving once and for all to be the absolute death of Abby Anderson. “What’s his name?”

Ellie is pulling on the reins, backing up from against the wall. She halts for a moment to look back at Lev, bewilderment in her eyes. “Kodak.”

“That’s kinda cold.”

Ellie’s face twists, and Abby’s fist clenched at her side. This girl doesn’t deserve any ounce of goodness that Lev has to offer.

Abby nudges him back toward the main road, closer to the Stratosphere and closer toward getting the fuck out of this city. “Lev, we’re leaving.”

Lev’s gaze lingers on Ellie for a moment later, but – _thank god_ – he steps back, turning to follow Abby. He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t lift a hand to wave, and Abby is so goddamn grateful for that.

“Hey,” Ellie’s voice breaks them out of their exit, and Lev spins back to face her with far too much hope in his eyes. Abby looks over her shoulder despite her better judgment, looking at Ellie in time to see her giving Lev a very, very tight smile and a very brief nod. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

Ellie nods back toward the front of the motel. “All of that. You’re pretty good with that bow.” She looks over her shoulder, gaze meeting her own bow slung across her back. 

The ache in Abby’s chest throbs at how Lev smiles at her.

If he knew. If he _knew_ what she had threatened to do to him.

“Oh,” Lev does not smile, but Abby notices the very faint blush creeping up on his cheeks that always manages to sneak up on him whenever he’s caught off guard. “Thank you.”

Just as quickly as Ellie was there with them, the mirage is faded, and she is gone and leaving nothing but a stunned Lev in her wake.

* * *

“What do you think she was doing here?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why would she be in Las Vegas?”

“Don’t care.”

“Do you think she’s part of The O—”

“— _Lev_.”

Lev’s question dies on his tongue.

It’s been like this for the past hour, ever since they made it out of the city. Lev may be curious, but he’s not clueless. He remembers Ellie all too well, remembers seeing Abby almost rip the light right out of her eyes. Abby knows this because they’ve talked about it far more than is probably healthy. When they were first headed to Santa Barbara, Abby told him everything. She told him about Joel and her father. She told him about her friends and the WLF. She told him about how much sleep she lost over those four years just seeing Joel Miller’s face in her mind. He knows that his face didn’t go away after she killed him – that it only made every single pain she was feeling that much worse.

She knows that Lev knows Ellie isn’t any sort of fucking role model (and Christ knows she’s not any better), and yet she can’t shake the way that he looked at her like he was in _awe_ of her. Like he’d never seen somebody slay so many giants in such a short span of time.

Abby so desperately wants to tell him that _he_ had helped her, that he could strong and powerful and wicked when he wanted to be.

But mostly, Abby just wants to get this entire morning out of her head. Abby drops an arm around Lev’s shoulder, pulling him in closer for a gentle squeeze. He shoves away from her, but she sees the smile creeping at his lips. He’s calling her a “weirdo” and it’s the nicest thing she’s ever heard.

* * *

Las Vegas has outskirts that stretch out far, far beyond the city streets – and it takes ages to get out of the city. They keep walking from there, hours bleeding into one another as the desert heat beats down on them. They find themselves weaving through valleys and canyons when they can, the slight relief given from the shadows making the journey slightly more bearable.

Lev’s map is practically stapled to his hand, constantly checking it, marking every sign they pass off on the map just to add to the illusion that they’re getting closer to an end goal. They stopped, but only for a moment to fill up their canteens, at Lake Las Vegas before they were back at it. Their goal for the end of the night was to make it to the Valley of Fire, which, if the signs that they were seeing in the area are to be believed, is only a few miles out now.

It’s dark out, the events from this morning nothing more than a flickering (and flickering, and flickering) memory. Lev has been passing the time by asking Abby a thousand and one questions about the Old World, because he never grows tired of learning more. Abby is happy to oblige, even if she’s growing crankier and crankier as the hours wind into the evening.

She was born just a couple years after the outbreak started. The world hadn’t turned to complete disarray, not just yet. She told Lev about the time she and her dad had found a movie theater in Utah, hooking a generator up to the projector and spending months watching every single film reel.

“Your dad sounds like he was a nice man,” Lev points out, scratching at his head and shifting his backpack on his shoulder. He climbs up on a rock ledge, holding his arms out like he’s on a balance beam while Abby stays parallel to him on the ground.

“He is,” she pauses. “He was.” She sighs, defeated and tired. “He would’ve loved you.”

Lev goes still beside her, hopping back off the ledge and walking forward a few feet without saying a word. And then he does. “I don’t know about that.”

“What do you mean you don’t know about that?” Abby asks, following him and siding back up next to him. “Lev, I mean it. He would’ve loved you.”

“I remember how Owen and Mel looked at me when they first saw me.”

Abby bristles at the names, but she’s just as quickly shaking her head back at him. “They helped you. They knew you were important.” She’s quiet, trying to gather her thoughts. She is always protective over him – probably too much – but she doesn’t often get _sappy_. “Lev, you’re so important. And somebody as good with a bow and arrow as you? Come on. You’re a better shot than me. And I _never_ say that. It’s not good for my ego.”

“Well, I’ve seen you with a bow and arrow and it’s not that hard to be better,” Lev retorts dryly, and she knows that he’s okay, and they’re okay. One time, Lev tried to show her how to use his bow – not her crossbow, but his manual bow. She’s pretty sure she hit everywhere _but_ the target, her fingers fumbling along the wood of the bow and the wire of the string, never moving near as fluidly as they needed to.

“I’m sorry he didn’t get to meet you,” she tells him honestly. “And I’m sorry you never got to meet…” she trails off, flashes of Manny and Nora in her mind and flipping her stomach inside out in that ugly way that it always does. “Well, everyone.”

With only the glow of the moonlight shining overhead and the ring of light cast by their flashlights in front of them, Abby still sees the smile Lev sees her. Small and quiet, but strong and grateful at the same time.

They walk on like that for another hour, until she finally sees the mountains growing larger, and larger, the desert stretching out before them – and there it is. Lake Mead, laid out past the valley they’ve been traveling through.

“Holy shit, kid,” she murmurs, finally taking a moment to appreciate where they are. Granted, she’ll appreciate it more after she’s actually had a few hours of sleep.

There is a path toward the lake, a few floodlights lining up the ground and leading to a small area of tents, a few pick-up trucks, and a lot of horses lined up around what appears to be some sort of makeshift stable. A community, not a big one, but one that probably – _probably_ – has a place where they can sleep for the night.

A few people look over at them as they approach, but it’s nothing like it was back in Vegas. It appears that this area is far more used to passersby, not so much looking for people looking to join a new resistance.

“Lodging?” a man asks gruffly, nodding at the two of them. Before they can get a word out, he’s pointing them toward a large tent near the back of the area. It’s filled with cots and mats, old sleeping bags and worn-in blankets. It’s not the best place they’ve had to stay for a night, but it’s far, far, far from the worst.

In some ways, it reminds her of the early days of the WLF stadium. It took a long time for it to turn into the established community that they made it into, and for a long time after they first cleared the place out, it was just groups of them laying scattered around the main floor of the stadium – cots from wall to wall. Eventually, they moved into the club areas and cabins, able to turn the facility into a communal living space. She can only imagine what it is like now, now that so many have been slain and the entire dynamic has shifted.

Lev drops his bag near a cot, not even bothering to remove his boots before he is lying down. “Lot of water around here,” he observes. “I think I’m gonna try and catch us something to eat in the morning.”

Abby ruffles a hand through his hair the same way her dad used to ruffle a hand through hers. “Counting on it, kid.”

* * *

Abby’s exhaustion leads to a nearly dreamless sleep, which she’s thankful for, considering the hell they’d gone through yesterday. However, she still finds herself startled awake when she sees Lev hovering over her with wide eyes. She knows that it’s early, the sun streaming through the material of the tent casting a dull pink glow around the room, but she also knows that Lev has never slept since the day she met him.

“What’s up?” She sits up. “Catch anything?”

“A couple guys were heading out when I got up, they let me use a spare rod. Caught a bass and a catfish.”

Abby reaches her hand out for a high five, which he gladly returns, before the look on his face flickers, like he’s remembered his mission. She raises her eyebrows at him. “…and?”

“The horses,” Lev points out, waving a hand toward the entrance of the tent, “I was looking at them this morning. And I think I saw Ellie’s standing with them. Kodak.”

Cold. Ice hitting her skin. She stands up, racking her brain for how that could be possible. They _had_ gotten here late last night, so it was possible that she had stopped for the night a few hours before they had. But why was she going this way? Was she going to Utah? Wyoming? What the _fuck_ were the odds that she was _here_?

“It might not be hers,” she tries to reason. “I mean, it’s a _horse_. They all look similar.”

“He had a white nose with black spots,” Lev argues, shaking his head a second later. "And I saw her.”

“Really burying the lead there, kid,” Abby scoffs, standing from the cot and raking her fingers through her hair. She looks back over her shoulder at him. “Did she see you?”

He nods a beat later. “She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t say anything. But she might have already left.”

Somehow, Abby imagines she’s not going to be that lucky.

However, while Abby may be a lot of things, a coward is not one of them. She shrugs it off as if this is the sort of thing that you can shrug off, making her way toward the portable utility sink they have set up in the far corner of the tent, turning the water on and not even waiting for it to warm up before she’s splashing it onto her face. She can go outside and if she sees Ellie then so fucking be it. She can do that. She’ll be _fine_.

So what if Ellie has tried to kill her more than once? Who hasn’t at this point?

She cleans up swiftly, going back to grab her pack and nodding Lev toward the door. “Let’s eat.”

Lev is pushing out of the tent with Abby at his heels, and she isn’t even two feet away before her world is tilting sideways for the eighth time in two days.

“Where are you going?”

She pauses, clenching her jaw for a second and keeping her eyes on Lev, who already has his eyes on Ellie. “Go get started on the fish, yeah?”

Lev nods after a second, albeit uneasily, and rocks back on his heels before turning and making his way toward where several other campers are hanging out near the fire pits.

Abby turns around, and there she is. Ellie, glowering and leaning against a wall of jagged rock, with her arms crossed over her chest. “You sure you’re not following me?”

“Yeah, you caught me,” Abby nips. “My mission in life is to figure out where you are and be right next to you.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Ellie simmers, and for a second that makes Abby’s blood churn, she sees the girl Ellie once was, the girl she was when she first saw her. Face pressed to the floor of a cabin with a knee wedged against her neck, crying and begging and pleading with Abby to leave Joel alone. The terrified girl from that day is not the girl standing across from her right now. She’s not the girl who chased her through a theater in Seattle or tried to drown her in Santa Barbara. The girl that Ellie was the first day Abby saw her probably died right along with Joel.

Joel’s face flashes through her mind. Again, again, again, and she battles the demon that reminds her of how disappointed her dad would be in her if he could’ve seen her that day.

…but if her dad was alive, it never would have happened in the first place.

To eliminate the risk of them running into each other again (and again, and again), Abby speaks up. “We’re going to Texas. Gonna talk to the guys that run this place and see if they’ll let us barter for a couple horses, and then we’ll be outta here.”

This, as it turns out, doesn’t make any part of the situation better or cut the tension the way that Abby had expected it to. Ellie’s whole face drops, eyes wide and fiery. _“Texas_? For _what_?”

“Why does it matter?”

Ellie doesn’t reply, shaking her head so slow it almost doesn’t look like she’s shaking it at all. “Change your route.”

“What?”

“Change. Your. Route.”

“No.”

What a stupid thing to request.

“ _I’m_ going to Texas,” Ellie’s voice trembles, but only for a second, “and I don’t want to see you there.”

Abby does not have time to respond at how absurd Ellie sounds before she hears the sound that they have all grown too painfully accustomed to. The unmistakable, shrill screech of runners and stalkers erupts through the campsite.

“Fuck,” Abby grunts, but she’s whipping her gun out of its holster in the same breath that Ellie is reaching for her bow. The two take off in separate directions as several of the campers flee. If Abby wasn’t so busy at the moment, she would wonder how the fuck any of them had survived on the road for this long as it was if all they did when enemies approached was _run away_.

It’s just Abby and Ellie and a few others from around the campground taking them on. Lev is swiftly leaping on top of a table with his bow perfectly aimed for a headshot. Abby has a runner grabbed from behind, snapping his neck. From the corner of her eye, she notices Ellie taking one down with a shiv.

They move in tandem around the campsite, taking them out one by one. Ellie sends an incendiary arrow straight through a stalker that’s aiming for Abby, and Lev stuns one with an arrow to the leg long enough that Ellie can take it out the rest of the way.

When the last of them is decimated, a few of the campers that had fled poke their heads back out of the tents to check that the coast is clear.

Abby turns to head for Lev before Ellie can think about approaching her again, siding up next to him. “You good?”

Lev is already back to cutting up the fish like nothing had interrupted him in the first place. He nods swiftly. “I’m good.” His head turns, looking past Abby to where Ellie is grabbing some of her arrows from out of the corpses on the ground. His eyes meet Abby’s. “ _You_ good?”

“For now,” she mutters, clapping a hand on his back for a second. “I’m gonna see about getting us a couple horses. If we keep it up like this, we’re not gonna make it to Texas by Christmas.”

“...by what?”

Abby freezes, looking over her shoulder at him. She tries to rack her brain for where they had been last Christmas, before painfully remembering that they had been in Rattlers’ territory right through Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. But _still_. What holidays did he celebrate? Had he celebrated any? She looks at Lev in momentary disbelief, holding a finger up to him. “Clearly we have a lot to talk about. Hold that thought.”

She has a hard time thinking about Lev’s upbringing sometimes. She remembers the immediate lurch she felt in her gut when they were attacked by the Seraphites in Seattle, hearing them call Lev a name that was no longer his, that might as well never have been his to begin with. Abby swallows hard, making her way toward where the man they’d spoken to the night before was reloading his rifle.

He looks up as she approaches, giving her an affirmative nod. “Nice work,” he tells her. “People pass through here and fuckin’ scatter when shit hits the fan. Almost makes you wonder why you offer it up in the first place.”

Abby nods before her gaze is moving toward the horses lined up. Sure enough, she sees Kodak amongst them. “I was just wondering what my friend and I could trade you for a couple horses?”

His eyes follow hers to the horses, standing up from his chair. He’s taller than he appears, broad shoulders and a mustache that curls on either end. “After that stunt you just pulled?” he asks, and she’s frozen for a moment before she sees him smiling, holding a hand out to her to shake. “You got it, consider it a done trade.”

He leads her to the horses, pointing out two near the end that used to belong to some campers that tried to rob the site a few months’ back. “They’ve just been here waitin’ for someone to take ‘em,” he says with a shrug. “You good with riding?”

“Good enough,” she responds, combing her fingers through the brown mane of the tan horse standing in front of her. The one next to it is speckled gray and white, a pitch-black mane. It reminds her of Lev immediately, and she knows it belongs to him.

By the time she is turning to regroup with him, she realizes she’s not the first in line. Ellie is there, crouched beside where he is plating the fish, and talking quiet enough that Abby can’t hear a word she’s saying.

 _"You made him a part of this,”_ Ellie’s voice taunts her, and she’s practically shoving people to the ground to get back to him faster.

“Lev, what are you doing?” she asks, and he seems confused when he meets her gaze.

Ellie looks back at her, slow and unimpressed. “We were just talking.”

Abby’s eyes stay on Lev, who is handing her a plate. “Ellie said she was headed to Texas, too. Wanted to see where we were going.” A beat goes by as Lev brings a bite of food to his lips, and his eyes stay trained on Abby’s. “I told her I couldn’t remember the name.”

Thank _fuck_ for Lev.

“I got us horses,” Abby points out, ignoring Ellie and taking a seat across from Lev. “We can leave when we finish up here.”

Lev nods, looking back down at his plate. Ellie doesn’t move, and when Lev looks back up, it’s her that he’s looking at. “Kodak get rested up?”

Ellie stiffens, like she still can’t believe that Lev is trying to make any sort of conversation with her. And then she’s nodding. “Yeah, he’s a trooper.”

Abby keeps eating, but her eyes stay on Lev. She can’t look at him without seeing Ellie’s blade at his neck. It keeps her up at night. It makes her sick to her stomach. And yet, here he is. Talking to Ellie about a fucking _horse_.

Ellie keeps her eyes on the two of them for a moment longer before she’s disappearing through a crowd of people that’s gathered near the campfire. Abby’s attention keeps focused on Lev. “You don’t have to talk to her, you know.”

“I know,” Lev responds. He takes another bite of his food. And then another. “I feel sorry for her.”

Abby’s head snaps up. “For _what_ reason?”

Lev shrugs, looking over at where Ellie is across the campground from them, gathering her things. “Her energy, I guess,” he says. “She seems sad.”

“Not your problem, kid.”

Lev nods, and they finish eating in silence.

* * *

They're grabbing their packs a short while later, making their way back toward the horses. All is forgotten – at least for now – as Lev spots them. His eyes immediately fall onto the gray and black one, and he’s moving for it. “Wow,” he breathes out softly, running his fingers down its mane. “We get to ride them?”

Abby nods. “Maybe now our feet won’t fall off, yeah?”

Lev doesn’t respond, too entranced by the creature in front of him. They haven’t been on horseback since they left the Seraphite camp, but Lev looks like he’s viewing a sunset for the very first time. “They’re beautiful,” he murmurs, and then he’s looking back at her. “We get to ride them?” he repeats himself.

Abby smiles, she can’t help herself. “Yeah, we do.” She is already climbing onto her horse when she notices that Lev is hesitating. She pauses for a moment, looking back down at him with concern in her eyes. “You need help?”

But Lev isn’t looking at the horse. He’s looking past the horse, a few more horses down to where Ellie is getting her gear situated on Kodak. Abby’s guts twist into a hard knot, and before she can get a word out to Lev, he’s stepping away from his horse and moving toward Ellie.

No. No, no, no. Whatever this is, _no_.

Abby hops off her horse as quickly as she’s gotten on it, taking big strides to catch up to Lev just as he’s saying her name. “Lev,” she tries to cut him off, but he is ignoring her.

“Ellie?”

Ellie freezes, turning to look at him. “Yeah?”

“We’re going to be running into each other a lot, I think,” he tells her, and Abby wants to die. Die. _Die_. “And I know how lonely traveling is.”

“ _Lev_.”

Lev nods back toward his and Abby’s horses. “Why don’t we just—”

“— _Lev—_ ”

“—ride together?”

Ellie’s eyes harden when she sees Abby practically ripping her own head off, but then her eyes are back on Lev. “Together?”

“She’s not riding with us,” Abby is quick to point out. Because absolutely not. Absolutely _fucking_ not. Every wall she’s built around herself is simultaneously closing in and crumbling at the exact same time. She needs to grab Lev and get him and whatever misguided intentions he has the fuck _out_ of here. He fired an arrow at Ellie’s girlfriend to get her off of her, he pointed his bow straight at Tommy’s head when Abby asked him to. Why the _fuck_ would he ask Ellie to come with them?

 _She seems sad_ , she hears Lev saying from before, but Abby doesn’t have it in her to care. _Let her_ be sad. Ellie is a big girl. Ellie makes her own choices.

Ellie’s eyes go from Lev to Abby to Kodak and back to Lev. Lev, who is often too practical for his own good, who is pessimistic and weary of the world around him, but somehow manages to be _too goddamn good_ at the exact same time. And Abby knows. Abby knows without Ellie even having to say a word, without Lev having to repeat the question or argue with Abby about it or _anything_ , because Abby knows how easy it is to feel drawn into Lev’s spirit.

She knows, just like that, that Ellie is coming with them.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ thank you ❤
> 
> *and also thank u to my beautiful squish, my wife, my love, my shawn hunter, my nel for beta reading this for me i'd die 4 u specifically*


	4. the bare minimum of being right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lev: you're kind of fun to be around, ellie
> 
> ellie: thanks it's from all the trauma
> 
> abby: i'm traumatized too you aren't special

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ i'm baaaaaaaaaack! ❤

* * *

* * *

_still with feet touching_

_still with eyes meeting_

* * *

* * *

Tonight’s dream is about Joel.

It’s never the same dream twice, but Joel is still a frequently recurring character beyond Ellie’s eyelids. If he could see her now, she doesn’t know what he would say. She doesn’t know if he’d have a single word to even say to her. If Tommy knew, he’d probably hobble his way out of Wyoming to kill her himself.

But this dream is about Joel. It’s Joel sitting on his back deck in Jackson, plucking strings on his guitar and somehow still managing to make it sound _like something_. “A lot of what makes music _music_ is the feeling you put into it,” Dream Joel tells Dream Ellie, who is sitting beside him with her own guitar resting against her knee.

“I feel…” Ellie begins, “I feel… _I feel_ …like I’m never gonna be any good at this.”

Joel laughs, hearty and smoky and _Joel_. “Not with that attitude, ‘yer damn right.” He keeps plucking and strumming, humming along with the cicadas in the trees. “What are you gonna do when I’m gone and can’t teach you any of this?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Ellie argues. “You’re never going anywhere.”

The lantern hanging above Joel’s head flickers once, twice, three times, until she is back on the floor of a mountain lodge, watching Abby bash the final blow into Joel’s skull with a golf club.

Ellie launches up from the floor where she has made her bed for the evening. They’re in a desert town in Arizona that looks like it had been long abandoned even _before_ the outbreak, the three of them sleeping in an old blue house with stables in the back. Abby and Lev had taken one bedroom while Ellie had taken the other, but she knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep – not really. And so, she finds herself on the floor, with her back pressed against a dirty mattress, and Joel’s battered face flickering through her mind.

She knows that she’s stupid. She knows what a terrible idea this was. She and Abby have barely uttered more than three words to each other since they left Lake Mead earlier in the morning, Lev making himself the middleman and asking far too many questions that Ellie didn’t want to answer.

“I’m only going with you because it’s pretty much a death sentence anymore to travel without a group,” Ellie had muttered earlier in the day. Abby’s response had been a disinterested shrug, which was one of the more conversational responses she had gotten out of her.

Not that she wanted to be making conversation with her _either_.

She moves across the ramshackle bedroom. It used to belong to a child, she’s assuming, judging by the faded clouds painted on the walls and the falling-down train table in the corner. She wonders where that kid is now. If the kid is still alive. If she has killed them at some point in her twenty years of traveling with aching feet and tired hands. She probably has.

As she makes her way out of the room, down the narrow, angled hallway, she sees Abby and Lev through the open door on the other side. Abby is rolled over on her stomach, gun resting at her hip, and Lev is asleep on the other end of the mattress, hands clenching and releasing at the air. 

She remembers the Scars – no, the Seraphites – from Seattle. They pierced her square through her chest, and she had never, ever known that an arrow could hurt _that_ badly. It’s hard to believe that a child like Lev could have come from a place like _that._

Since they started their trip together this morning – however begrudgingly – Lev, yes, had been the conversation mediator. But at the same time, Lev had always been incredibly careful to make sure the conversation could never spin back to him or his life or his upbringing. He only spoke of his life like it had started a year and a half ago. If Abby isn’t in the story, he doesn’t bring it up. Ellie might not be a fan of mysteries, but there is something about Lev that tells her to let it slide.

She slips out the front door, not going too far, but just enough that she can sit on the rickety front porch. Her eyes close, palms pressing down to her cheeks.

If Joel could – no, if _Tommy_ could see her now.

But fuck Tommy. She made that determination that day at the farmhouse, when he guilted her into going after Abby, into losing _everything_ she had left. Tommy isn’t the only one who lost Joel that day. _She_ lost Joel. Everyone lost Joel.

But Abby…

Abby had lost people, too.

Abby had lost _everyone_ , really. And Ellie doesn’t like the copper taste behind her teeth that nags at her, telling her that she is the reason. No. She’s not the reason. _Abby_ is the reason. Abby made her bed, and Abby gets to lay in it now.

Christ. It’s going to be a long road to Texas if they spend the whole time pointing fingers at each other, isn’t it?

“Ellie?”

Ellie sits up a little higher, hands falling away from her face as she turns, sees Lev hovering between the screen door and the front door. He doesn’t move closer to her, like she’s feral and rabid and likely to attack if approached.

“Did I wake you?”

“I don’t really sleep,” Lev offers with a shrug. He hesitates a second longer before stepping away from the door and moving closer to her. He takes a seat next to her on the step. “I think all I do is doze here and there, and then I’m up again.”

She nods, toeing the tip of her sneaker against the gravel at her feet. “It’s hard to sleep.”

“I don’t think I even get tired anymore,” he says with a weak smile.

“I think I’ll be tired for the rest of my life.”

Lev snorts, but only a little. He takes a seat next to her on the step, making sure he’s clear on the opposite end. “I’m…” he trails off, looking down at his hands. “I’m glad you decided to come with us. I know you probably didn’t want to.”

“Don’t really see why you _wanted_ me to.” Ellie sniffs, jerking her head back toward the house behind them. “Just… make sure you stick around, y’know? I don’t think she and I are really, uh, equipped to handle each other.” 

Don’t think about Joel. Don’t think about Joel.

Lev nods, and he’s quiet for a minute. One turns to two and two turns to three and Ellie finds solace in the silence. It brings her back to long days with Riley when she didn’t worry about the entire world being out to get her, when the only real enemy was Corporal Dickhead and feeling like a misunderstood teenager in a quarantine zone. Riley, who she never lets herself think about for longer than a second. Riley was brave, and strong, and fearless. All she _wanted_ was to be a Firefly. Had things been different, had only Ellie gotten bit that night, would Riley have _known_ Abby? Would Joel have killed Riley in his mad quest to save Ellie?

Nope. No, _now_ the thoughts are getting too big for her body.

“I’m sorry about your, um, your father,” Lev speaks quietly between them after an eternity of lingered pauses.

Is that how Abby had described Joel? Had she called him her _father_? What had she said? Had she been bragging about it? About the revenge she extracted? The little green monster that exists inside Ellie’s brain nags her on, pleads with her to ask for more information, and Ellie strangles the thought down.

Ellie’s voice is dry as she utters back, “Thanks,” before looking at the desolate, dark desert surrounding them. “We should head out at sunrise.”

“Yeah,” Lev agrees, turning his gaze away from her and out to the never-ending expanse of sand and dirt and earth. 

They sit together for what feels like ages. Not speaking, just existing, sitting side by side. Two lonely renegades against a bleak backdrop.

* * *

Lev disappears back into the house as the sky around them begins to lighten up, and Ellie takes that as her cue to get up and grab her pack. Lev calls out Abby’s name as they enter the home and is met with a tired grunt and a sleepy mutter of the word, “Early.”

How can she sleep?

_Stop it._

Sometimes, the voice inside her head isn’t her voice at all. Sometimes, it’s Joel. Her conscience, for better or worse.

She grabs her pack, hiking it back over her shoulder and slipping back out through the front door before she faces a run-in with Abby. The less time she has to spend next to her day in and day out, the better. What a fucking _stupid_ idea this is.

Ellie heads down the front steps, back to where Kodak is asleep curled at the base of the stable. Abby and Lev’s horses are sleeping standing a few feet away, heads rested against one another. Kodak is the odd man out, and Ellie can’t help but feel the pinch of similarity.

“Hey, buddy,” she coaxes, crouching down beside him and combing her fingers through his mane slowly. Gently, gradually, his eyes open and he’s looking back at her. She steps back long enough so that he can stand, and she runs her hand up and down his neck for a moment or two. “Let’s find you some water, yeah?”

She isn’t getting very far before the door is opening and Abby and Lev are making their way into the early morning air. Abby and her eyes meet briefly, only for a second, and Ellie feels a rattle in the pit of her stomach.

“All right, Map Keeper,” Abby’s focus is no longer on Ellie, but back on Lev. “Where we headed to today?”

Lev, Ellie has realized in her brief time with him, is fascinated with maps. He has at least six of them in his bag, ranging from ones that cover the entire United States to ones for individual states as they pass through them – and any other ones he can loot from corpses on the way, even if they’re for states like Florida or Illinois.

Lev unfolds his map with ease, shaking it out so that it’s wide open. He taps his finger near a corner, and Ellie releases Kodak’s reins long enough that she can see just where he’s pointing. “I think we can make it here by tonight.”

Abby leans in, following the trail Lev made with her own finger. “Petrified Forest,” she reads quietly, and then the shadow of a smile is tugging up at one corner of her mouth. “Sick.”

Ellie wants to argue, to point out that they need to be heading for more mass populated areas, but she trails off, merely ignoring the fact that Abby is _right there_ so that she can look at the map herself. “Flagstaff is on the way,” she points out, pressing the pad of her middle finger down on the name of the city. She feels the eyes on her, both Abby and Lev’s twin gazes, that she used her hand that only has three fingers accounted for. Quickly, reflexively, she pulls her hand away again. “Gotta stop there for supplies,” she says, shrugging off the gazes on her and making her way back to Kodak. “We need to find somewhere to hunt, and we’re gonna need water.”

“She’s right,” Lev points out and Abby elbows him into his side.

“It’s the bare minimum of being right,” Abby mutters, eyes honed in on Ellie like a hawk. “But whatever, let’s go.”

“All I heard is that I’m right,” Ellie finds herself quipping back without much thought as to just _who_ she is quipping at. “So yeah. Let’s go.”

If Abby’s eyes are burning a hole into the back of her head as they hit the trail, Ellie feigns disinterest.

* * *

They’re not two hours in and she begins to notice that Lev is looking at his horse with worry flickering in his dark eyes. Abby, she sees, is keeping an eye on him as well, but despite her better judgement, it is Ellie that speaks first.

“You good?”

“Animals,” Lev replies, voice shaky with uneasiness. “They’re just. They’re really big, you know?”

“She won’t hurt you,” Abby points out, and Lev is only nodding back at her.

Ellie keeps her eyes forward, following a trail of rusted over highway signs telling them that they are approaching a town by the name of Valentine. She looks back at Lev, whose horse has nearly slowed to a crawl at Lev’s nerves. “Hey, how far is Valentine from Flagstaff?” she asks, and it’s enough to distract him, enough to make him look up ahead and see the signs for himself.

“Valentine was kind of close to us on the map,” he points out. “We probably still have a ways to go.”

She knows this, of course, but the change in subject is enough to have Lev urging his horse a little further, a little faster so that he can keep up with Ellie and Abby.

“You named her yet?” she asks.

“The horse?”

“Yeah.”

Lev looks down at the horse, at its speckled coat and dark mane. “No. Not yet. A name will come to me, and then I’ll know.” He turns to look at Abby. “Have you named yours?”

Abby snorts at the question and it makes Ellie’s blood boil. Abby’s eyes meet her gaze, and then they meet Lev’s. “Oh, you were serious,” she clears her throat. Her horse is a patchwork of beige, tan, and chocolate brown. “Moose.”

“ _Moose_?” Lev coughs out a laugh.

Abby glowers back at him. “I don’t name things.”

“Clearly,” Ellie scoffs. Lev’s head turns back to her, and the smile that lifts at the corner of his mouth makes something inside of her twist, just a little. “Have you ever _seen_ a moose?”

“I’m from _Utah_.”

“So that means you know they don’t look anything like your horse,” she points out. “It’s color is more like a fawn, at best.”

“Fine,” Abby clips. “ _Bambi_.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Lev’s nose crinkles in confusion, turning back to look at Abby. “What does Bambi mean?”

“Yeah, Abby,” Ellie chides. “You wanna explain the baby deer watching his parent get butchered right in front of him to Lev, or do you want me to?”

Abby is quiet, eyes boring into Ellie for a long one, two, three pulses. “You’re goddamn lucky the kid likes you so much.”

For fuck knows what reason.

* * *

They stop for a bite to eat somewhere between Valentine and Flagstaff, Lev and Ellie going off hunting while Abby makes sure the abandoned rest area they’ve approached is clear of any infected.

Lev and Ellie don’t speak much while hunting, both of them too focused on keeping their eyes and ears open, focusing in on any wildlife that they can take back with them. Lev’s form is swift and sharp, like he’s been doing this all his life – and judging by the way the Seraphites can fire off their arrows with their eyes closed, she’s pretty sure that he _has_ been. 

“Is that a pig?” Lev asks, breaking the two of them out of their comfortable silence. He is crouched behind a set of jagged rocks, and Ellie sides up beside him to see what he’s focused on. It _does_ look like a pig. Kind of.

“A warthog, maybe?” Ellie counters, and Lev doesn’t give himself a moment to think about it before he’s whipping out his bow and firing off an arrow straight into the creature’s neck. Ellie fires off a second shot to make sure he’s down, and a third for good measure. Ellie hesitates for a moment, checking over both shoulders, before she’s bumping Lev to standing, the two of them moving back to the… whatever it is and removing their arrows. “Good eye,” she tells him with a shadow of a smile.

Lev helps Ellie hoist up the animal so that they can bring it back to Abby, glancing back over at her as they trek their way back through the desert heat. “I prefer hunting over fishing,” he tells her. “Land is a lot easier to handle.”

“Not a water fan?”

“ _No_.”

It’s a brief flash, a flicker of a moment, and suddenly Ellie has a blade against his throat.

 _You made him a part of this_.

Another flash, and Lev is standing behind Abby, behind Ellie, while Abby has a blade against Dina’s skin. _Good_ , Abby had spat out, and it was Lev – _Lev_ – who had saved her.

Ellie swallows hard, shoving the thought as far from her reach as she possibly can. “I didn’t know how to swim for a long time,” she tells him, seeing Abby up ahead of them and ignoring the way her skin nearly leaps off her bones. “Glad I learned, though. The whole water fear goes away after a while.”

“I can swim,” he tells her, and his eyes meet Abby’s from a few feet forward. He proudly nods his head toward the beast slung over his and Ellie’s shoulders. “I just don’t like to.” He waves at Abby. “Look! It’s huge.”

“Nice work, kid,” Abby tells him, and the way she smiles at him – the genuine pride? – leaves Ellie with a churn in her gut. It’s familiar, that smile. She knows that smile, because she has received that smile. She’s given that smile to JJ – for the silliest things, for blowing bubbles, for a good burp, for sleeping for more than three consecutive hours – but she is mostly familiar with that smile because of the person that was always giving _her_ that smile.

The smile Lev sends back to Abby somehow hurts worse.

* * *

It is another few hours’ past by the time they are approaching Flagstaff. The decrepit, falling-apart township stares them head-on. It isn’t like other cities that Ellie has passed through before – there isn’t much of a skyline, all looming and dark and overgrown. Instead, it’s mountainous, and they can see all the buildings and houses as they come up along a mountainside toward the city, small and beneath them.

“Think they still have supplies?” Lev asks hopefully and from the corner of her eye, Ellie can feel his eyes on her.

Ellie nods stiffly, jutting her chin out toward the city before she’s beckoning Kodak forward, down the other side of the cliff. “Gotta be something,” she tells him.

From behind her, she hears Abby’s gruff voice muttering to Lev. “Why is she _commandeering_ this whole thing?”

“Problem?” she glances over her shoulder at her, and she swears if she kept her gaze on her for even a second longer, Abby’s head would explode then and there. She clicks her tongue, urging Kodak to move forward.

The roads are beat up, swelling gaps between the pavement and barricades blocking off neighborhoods along the way. It’s clear that a group has made their home here, but at this point, that’s to be expected no matter where they wind up. There are groups everywhere, travelers in packs who find solace in each other.

Ellie thinks back to The Oasis, back to Tobias and Connie and their crew of lost souls. She wonders how far along they’ve made it, how many more hotels they’ve cleared out since she left them behind.

She’s not going to let the thoughts of _left behind-ness_ make her think about anyone else who’s been “left behind.” Not Riley, not Joel’s limp and bloody corpse, not Jesse or Tommy or Dina or JJ or…

“A pharmacy,” Lev points out, ripping her out of her stupor as they head down the main drag of town, which is nothing but old buildings and dirt. “Worth a check?”

“Yeah,” Abby agrees, and she’s suddenly pushing ahead, past Ellie, and toward the front of the building. She hops off her horse – still nameless, because apparently Bambi wasn’t it – giving it a pat on the back before she’s ramming the butt of her gun into the front window without a second thought or a moment to listen to her surroundings.

“If we get attacked by a fucking _bloater_ because of that, it’s on you,” Ellie mutters, hopping off Kodak and following her into the pharmacy. Abby ignores her, because of course she does, making her way further into the old building.

She’s shoving empty boxes and bottles aside, coming out with a few spare bottles of pills and rubbing alcohol. Ellie snags the last couple packs of bandages and wraps and gauze, dropped under shelves and wedged into corners, long forgotten.

Lev moves further through the pharmacy, running his fingers along beat-up boxes of hair dye and tissues. He stops for a moment, picking up a box with a model on the cover that has white blond hair, the word BLEACH in giant letters across the front. “Is this hair color in a box?”

“Yeah,” Abby responds, only glancing up for a second before her hands and eyes are back on the journey for anything salvageable. “Owen and Mel grabbed some when we were kids, dared me to try it? My hair was fuckin’ _orange_. Dad freaked out.”

It’s a quick flash of a moment, when Abby’s whole face changes at talking about such a memory. There’s light in her eyes, a smile on her face. As soon as her gaze meets Ellie, it’s diminished all over again, and her head is back down, moving into the next aisle.

Ellie watches her for a second before she’s moving over to Lev, grabbing the box of bleach from his hands. “I think you’d look pretty… _cold_ with this.”

Even in the darkness of the store, Ellie can see his blush.

He walks away, leaving Ellie behind with the box of hair color. She tucks it into her backpack for safe-keeping.

* * *

They carry on their journey through the desolate town. It’s almost _too_ quiet, and it sends the hairs on Ellie’s arm up on end. “Anyone else getting a… _vibe_?”

Surprisingly, it’s Abby who responds. “Like we’re gonna get jumped any second now?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

They don’t, somehow. It’s growing darker by the second, and Ellie knows they still have quite a ways to go before they reach their goal for the night – Petrified National Forest. Kodak is slowing down and Ellie’s body is sagging forward, lulling herself into a slumber from which she has to shake herself awake.

“There’s a hotel,” Lev points out. “Monte Vista.” He turns his head, looking to Abby for affirmation, and then to Ellie a few moments later. “We could crash there tonight.”

“Not arguing with that,” Abby responds, even the invincible, great Abby Anderson showing a moment of weakness, of exhaustion.

Ellie looks up ahead, at the withered lettering standing on top of the old brick building ahead of them. _HOTEL MONTE VISTA._

Maybe she’ll actually sleep tonight. For once.

They approach the side of the building, hopping off their horses side-by-side, before slowly approaching the building. “If we’re gonna get jumped,” Ellie points out, quiet voice loud against the silent street, “it’s gonna be now.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Lev counters, leaning against the large, glass windows for a moment to listen in before Abby is pulling him back by the collar of his shirt.

“Don’t push your luck,” she warns him quietly.

Ellie crouches down to listen for another moment or two, debating on smashing in a window before she sees an old air conditioning unit along the alleyway, a partially open window above it. “Come on,” she ushers them quietly forward.

She climbs on first, reaching for Lev’s hand to pull him up along with her. Abby hangs back, checking either side of the alleyway as Ellie climbs up and into the building, dropping down to the floor with a soft _thud_.

She stays crouched, listening closely. No grunts, no groans, or retches. There is no fucking way they got lucky, is there?

Lev drops down behind her, crouching along the wall and poking his head out around the corner. Abby drops in a second later.

“There’s nothing,” Ellie breathes, voice wary in disbelief.

Abby doesn’t crouch beside them, standing straight and walking ahead of them. “I’m gonna check the floor. If there are rooms and it’s clear, let’s just call it luck for tonight and figure the shit out tomorrow,” she says, racking her shotgun and pushing forward.

Lev stands a second later, peering into the ajar door across from him and Ellie. There are some busted open vending machines, an ice machine that hasn’t had any use in over twenty-five years. But no infected. No angry hunters and gatherers to accuse them of what they’re doing here. “Weird to not feel hunted for once,” he says cautiously as Ellie wedges herself past him, further into the room.

She checks the vending machines for anything that may have been left behind – nothing at all – before turning back to him. “Yeah. I don’t like it,” she tells him. She hates that feeling – that things are going _too_ well, that the other shoe is bound to drop in no time at all.

“It’s clear,” Abby’s voice echoes off the walls as she and Lev make their way back out to the main floor. She approaches them, nodding her head toward the row of doors on either side of her. “Nothing downstairs either.” She drops an arm around Lev’s shoulder, guiding him around the corner of the hall. “Take your pick, kid.”

Ellie lags behind them, still keeping her ears on high alert. When you travel as much as she does – as much as they all do, let’s be honest – you know to never, ever get comfortable. She would kill to not feel uneasy for one second.

Abby and Lev pick a room on one side of the hall and Ellie picks the room across from them. There are no spores. There is nothing _wrong_. But she feels like her skin is going to disintegrate at any second from the nerves of the unexpected alone.

She’s about to close the door after her, wedge the nightstand square against it and prepare herself for an emergency exit out the nearest window when necessary when Lev stops her in the doorway.

“I picked a name,” he tells her with a small smile.

She’s caught off guard for a second, wondering, just for a moment, how someone can still speak with so much hope in their eyes after everything they’ve been through. “Yeah?”

“Artemis,” he responds.

“Artemis,” she echoes.

“My, um, my sister,” his voice stills for a moment, “she used to tell me these stories when were little? About gods, but not our gods. Not _Her_ , you know? Other gods in other places from other times. And Artemis was the goddess of hunting and gathering and nature. She was a protector and…” His bottom lip worries between his teeth. “She was Yara’s favorite. So, I feel like if I name her Artemis—”

“—you’ll have her with you,” Ellie finishes softly, her heart nothing more than a hollow drum between her lungs.

“Yeah,” he says softly, tentatively. “Like she’s still protecting me.”

It’s a somber second that follows his words before Ellie replies. “She is, Lev.”

He gives her a sad smile, weak and timid. “Good night, Ellie.” And before she can say a word back, he is turning, heading across the hall, back to his own nest and his own person.

And Ellie, as Ellie has grown far too accustomed, is left alone.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ once again, and always and forever, thank y'all so much for your interest in this piece. it means SO MUCH to me.
> 
> and shamelessly so, [here is the link to the playlist that i created for this fic](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=1rvMFNY5TIuM-XI0UU9DRg) (and, therefore, the only music that's been playing while i've been writing it).
> 
> see y'all on the next update! ❤


	5. a stick of dynamite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> feelings can't catch abby she runs too fast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW ***this chapter includes a scene with acts of transphobia and sexual assault, it may be upsetting to read***
> 
> ❤ THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR PATIENCE!!!
> 
> this chapter is longer than all the previous chapters because there was just... so much that i felt i needed to include here, and so it just kept going.
> 
> ([the playlist has been updated with, like, ten more songs](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=wBSKpU6qQcaCh1UVGznj8A), so please enjoy, and PLEASE ENJOY THIS CHAPTER. it is my favorite one so far. ❤

* * *

* * *

_hate is spitting out each other’s mouths_

_but we’re still sleeping like we’re lovers_

* * *

* * *

Arizona was never-ending. It was long expanses of deserts and mountains and hills and plains and sand and rocks and fucking _rattlesnakes_ – which, somehow, Abby had found herself less prepared for than she did for clickers coming out of goddamn rock quarries. 

Through Arizona and across the state line into New Mexico, Lev asks a lot of questions – more to Ellie than to Abby, since at this point she figures _he_ figures he’s talked Abby to death. He asks her about her immunity – to which she hardly answers – and he asks her if a snake bite would kill her even if a bite wouldn’t turn her.

She thinks much longer about that than Abby would have expected her to, before she looks back at Lev with a scrunched-up nose, shaking her head. “I don’t think we should test the theory.”

“Probably for the best,” Lev agrees, and Abby knows somewhere in her angry, dead, beating heart that she should be happy that Lev has found a friend. Or some shit. But she’s not happy he’s found a friend. They have been at this route for a few days now, according to Lev’s map, they’re somewhere in the middle of New Mexico – past Albuquerque, but not close enough to the border to be considered “near Texas.” They’re cutting south, more toward El Paso than toward Lubbock, and Lev has his sights set on a place called Carlsbad that’s famous for its caves.

When they first made it into the state, the abandoned truck stop they stumbled into – aside from the shambler waiting for them behind the counter – there were _DISCOVER NEW MEXICO_ guidebooks. New – or as new as nearly thirty-year-old guide books could be. Lev has been devouring it ever since, prattling off trivia whenever he feels a lag in conversation (which, with Abby and Ellie at the helm, is often).

_“They have an ice cave here! It’s always freezing cold, even in a desert—”_

_“—and speaking of deserts, they have one that’s totally made out of crystals—”_

_“—they have the world’s largest enchilada!” Lev paused. “Hey, what’s an enchilada?”_

* * *

Abby doesn’t like to give Ellie credit, but when it comes to Lev, she has to. Only a little, and only in small doses, but she begrudgingly does. Because Ellie is patient with Lev, and she listens to him when he talks. She doesn’t look at him and judge him because of his past or because of where he came from like so many others do. It’s the only credit she can give her – the only credit she will _ever_ give her – and she hates herself for even giving her that much.

It’s when they’re stopped for the night in Carlsbad – late, and with the promise of stopping by those god forsaken caves that will probably have who the fuck knows _what_ in them in the morning – that she overhears Ellie and Lev speaking softly in the bathroom of the abandoned house they’ve taken shelter in for the night. They picked the house because of the ravine that was behind it, a steady flow of clean water – more than enough to fill their canteens and decently clean up. Abby had gone out to search for food (which, in hindsight, was a strange offer for _her_ to make, considering who she’s traveling with), and when she comes back with a few rabbits, she can hear them from down the hall.

“So, when you pour the water, that’s it? It’s just a different color?”

She hears Ellie laughing at Lev’s question, hovering in the door frame but not looking in, not yet. “Dude, yeah. If you look in the mirror, you can already see it’s different. Just look.”

And _then_ Abby is looking in.

Ellie is standing behind Lev, who is standing in front of the chipped, porcelain sink. His hair is cut shorter, closer to his scalp – and gone are his black locks, replaced with vivid, bright yellow, wet like paint and matted down against his skull. She thinks back to the drug store from Arizona, Lev’s curiosity about hair color in a box. “What’s going on?”

Lev turns to look at her with wide eyes, but a smile is curving up at his lips. “I’m getting new hair.”

Something hollow twists in Abby’s gut, a knife with a dull blade. She looks between Ellie and Lev, but the words are dying on her tongue. Lev looks _happy_. Her eyes go back to Ellie. “You just decided to give him new hair?”

“It was time for a change,” is all Ellie says in response, and then she’s pouring a bucket of water over Lev’s newly bleached hair, and that’s that.

* * *

“I don’t like it,” Abby observes, squinting up at the Carlsbad Caverns with a grimace. Lev is already up ahead of both her and Ellie, climbing up on the rocks and going further and further into the depths.

“Abby, come on, it looks like _teeth_ ,” he points out, like this is somehow a selling point.

Abby shoots one final look over her shoulder, back at Kodak and Artemis and her horse with no name – she could get on and _go_. She can tell Lev that she’ll catch up with him when he’s done. Somehow, she thought that heights would be her biggest obstacle, but there’s something about the caves in front of her that are sending chills down to her ankles.

It certainly doesn’t help that Ellie is immediately springing into action, talking about how _fucking cool_ caves are and how there could be _“all sorts of cool shit”_ in there. Lev is looking at Ellie like she’s an undiscovered planet and Abby feels the hollow pit in her stomach growing even larger.

Lev looks back over his shoulder at her. “Abby, come _on_ ,” he groans.

Ellie pauses, hovering between a rock formation and looming stalactite at the entrance. “Yeah, Abby,” she taunts, and it sets Abby’s skin on fire. “You scared?”

She can rip her throat out and make it look like an accident.

Abby shoots one last look over her shoulder at their horses before she’s hiking her bag up over her shoulder and following Ellie and Lev further into the depths of the caverns. Lev is busy rattling off facts that he’d read in his guidebook and Ellie is listening aptly. Abby’s eyes keep peering over her shoulder, but then her focus always lands back on the two of them – Ellie and Lev.

It’s fucked up, honestly. It’s fucked up that Ellie can waltz into their lives – after ruining Abby’s – and just charm her way into Lev’s good graces. Last night, Lev looked at his reflection in the mirror for almost an entire hour after his hair was rinsed out. 

_“I almost don’t recognize myself,”_ he told Abby, and he told her like it was a secret. _“I like that.”_

Ellie had done that for him. _Ellie_ had made him feel like that. Her hands clench and unclench at her sides and she can hear a phantom Owen at her side, teasing her for feeling threatened by someone like Ellie.

 _"Come on, Abs,”_ he whispers. _“Her? Don’t give her the power.”_

She already has the power. That’s the thing. She has all the power.

The green monster lives under her skin, the one her father used to always try and convince her didn’t exist – but Abby has always known better. The little green monster has sharp teeth and razor-like claws. It is the same monster that had continuously convinced her that Owen and Mel would never last and that therefore it was okay to fuck him when she was out on patrol, that had told her that what Joel Miller had done was personal – was an attack on just her, and only her. And now, it’s the very same monster that is telling her that Lev is going to leave. He is going to leave the first chance he gets. He’s not going to go to Galveston. He’s going to stay in Austin, with _Ellie_.

Ellie really isn’t going to stop until she takes everyone from her, is she?

“Shut the fuck up,” Abby snaps through gritted teeth, and it’s not until Ellie and Lev are both looking at her that she realizes she wasn’t saying it to Owen or the verdant demon running rampant in her blood vessels.

“Abby?” Lev asks, but Abby is moving forward, right toward Ellie.

“This is _your_ fault.”

Ellie blanches back at her. “What?”

“You did this. You took _everything_ from me.”

Lev is reaching for her arm, hand reaching for her wrist before she is shaking him away like a mosquito. “Abby—”

"And you just won’t fucking _stop_.”

“What the fuck is your problem?” Ellie snaps, and Abby’s veins are pumping with pure gasoline. “You think I want to be here? You think this is what I _want_? I want you fucking _dead_. That’s what I want.”

“ _Ellie_.”

“No,” Abby holds up a hand to Lev to stop him, but her eyes never leave Ellie’s. “Let her talk.” She looks at Ellie long and hard, crossing her arms in front of her chest like the asshole she feels like. “If you want me dead so bad, let’s get it the fuck over with.”

Ellie is moving forward, but Lev is pushing ahead, pushing between them. “Stop it,” he snaps. He has a hand on Ellie’s shoulder and she stills beneath it. His eyes burn a hole into Abby’s, and he looks at her in disbelief – he doesn’t recognize the woman in front of him, and she doesn’t know if she recognizes herself, either. But she is a train running off the tracks, she has lost her brakes. She is running, running, running. “Abby, what is the matter with you?”

“This has nothing to do with you, Lev,” Abby bites, eyes glued to Ellie.

“I should have let you die in Santa Barbara,” Ellie scoffs. “Should’ve just fucking kept your head under the water.”

“Guess you should’ve just kept that blade to Lev’s throat, too, right?”

Lev goes still between them.

Ellie’s body sags backwards.

And Abby regrets the words. She wants to shove them back in, wants to swallow them whole. She doesn’t want to see the look on Lev’s face – steamrolled, broken, his world imploding in front of him. She knows that look – she’s _worn_ that look.

“What?” he asks softly.

If Ellie wasn’t frozen against the wall, Abby knows that she would be dead.

“Lev,” Ellie finds her voice enough to whisper. “Lev—”

But Lev doesn’t look at Ellie. He turns to look at Abby. He is electrified, eyes lit with venom and poison. “Don’t follow me,” he says, words slow and deliberate and so, so hollow. “Just leave me alone.”

And then he is turning. And he is running further into the depths of the cave. And he is gone.

* * *

Her world is on fire. The walls of the cave are growing smaller and tighter, and Ellie is somehow growing bigger, and bigger still. No. _No._ Ellie might have held the blade, but _she did this_. “Fuck,” Abby stammers. “ _Fuck_.”

And then Ellie is shoving her. Hard. Abby’s back slams into the wall of the cave and a crack rattles down her spine. “You just can’t leave shit alone, can you?” Ellie seethes. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

" _You_ ,” Abby fumes, and then she is lunging for Ellie and sending the two of them toppling backwards, falling toward the ground. “You don’t get to have him.”

“What the fuck are you _talking about_?” Ellie flips them over, pinning Abby down and yanking at her short tufts of hair.

Abby punches her in her side, knocking them back into a wall and holding her down with her knee locked against Ellie’s hip. “You shouldn’t be here!”

There’s a wheeze from beneath her and Ellie is swinging for Abby’s jaw. “Oh, you think so? You think I want to be on the fucking road with _you_?” she coughs out, kicking her hard in the gut and pushing away from her. “You fucking _killed_ Joel. You fucking tortured him with a goddamn golf club and _murdered—_ ” her voice cracks and she’s gasping for air. There are tears stinging her eyes, and a moment later they are mixing with the dirt and blood on her face. And then she is pushing to her feet, pushing away from Abby. “You _murdered_ him.”

Abby stands, spitting blood from between her teeth. “Yeah, and then you killed everyone I had left. You tried to slit Lev’s throat. I think we’re _even_.”

“I lost the only family I have _left_ because of you,” Ellie crowed. “I lost Dina, I lost JJ, I—”

“Oh, _fuck you_ , Ellie. No, you didn’t,” Abby stops her. “I let you go,” Ellie stands rigid, hands shaking. “I let you go,” she repeats, gravel in her throat. “More than once I let you go. And you couldn’t just fucking _leave us alone_.”

Ellie scoffs. She’s looking down at her shoes – black and white sneakers that are falling apart at the seams that she refuses to get rid of. “Yeah,” she says bitterly. She’s smiling, but there’s no humor in it. “A lot of good leaving you alone did me.”

The hammering in Abby’s heart slows, staggeringly so, and she leans against the opposite end of the cave. “He’s a good fucking kid.”

“I know he is,” Ellie says, and she says it quickly. She says it with certainty. “He’s a really good kid.”

Abby knows that his words are going to keep her up at night. She will see that look on his face every time she closes her eyes. She turns her head, looking in the direction he ran, and very quickly, she is standing up. This is a big fucking cave, and he just _took off_. Her head turns, and she sees that Ellie is standing up in the same breath. They’re looking at each other, and they’re not saying a word.

They’re just running off into the darkness.

* * *

“He couldn’t have gotten that far,” Ellie says, but she doesn’t sound like she believes it. Her flashlight flickers and she smacks it against her palm, waving it across the walls of limestone before hopping across a chasm and turning her head over her shoulder, waiting for Abby to follow suit. “This place is fucking huge, though.”

“Not exactly reassuring,” Abby grunts, hopping across the gap and willing herself to not look down. The caverns aren’t only huge, but they are winding. There are twists and turns everywhere, and it goes lower, and lower, and lower. She vaguely remembers Lev mentioning something about a ‘bottomless pit’ before they got here this morning, and her insides twist at the thought.

Ellie crouches low, waving her flashlight once more around them before she’s calling Lev’s name out into the depths. It echoes around them, becoming part of the wind, and there is no response.

“Fuck,” Abby mutters, and Ellie beckons her to follow her.

They go lower, rounding another bend. The walls are jagged, there are giant pillars of rocks hanging from overhead, and Abby is sure that to some people, this would be considered beautiful – to her, it just looks like the inside of clickers, and the thought of Lev being lost, trapped, in here makes her sick to her stomach. And this is her fault. She did this.

“LEV!” Abby hollers, and that’s when it happens.

The wall behind Ellie shifts, before it’s splitting apart all together, and the stalker is moving for them steadfast. It is grabbing for Ellie, screeching, and Abby is scrambling for her shotgun as Ellie swings at it with her shiv.

Another crackle from behind them as Abby’s gun fires off, and then another is grabbing for Abby’s arm, and she is swinging at it with the butt of her gun. Ellie takes down the stalker that has her with her blade and Abby shoots hers down, and then Ellie is grabbing for Abby’s arm. _“Come on,”_ she’s urging, and they are running. They are jumping another chasm that the stalkers can’t cross, but their battle cries are alerting more, more, more, and holy _fucking shit_ , where is Lev?

_Where is he?_

They round another corner and Abby checks each and every wall to make sure that there aren’t any other stalkers hiding with their skin camouflaged into the rock formations. She thinks they’re in the clear, and she nods them forward. “We have to be getting close,” she says quietly, but she has no fucking clue if it’s true.

Ellie nods just the same, guiding the two of them downhill before stopping dead in her tracks, Abby colliding into her back.

“What the fuck?”

“Lev,” Ellie whispers.

Only it’s not Lev. It’s his bow.

It’s dropped on the ground, next to his New Mexico state map that now has a rip straight down the middle. Every nerve in Abby’s body lights up, her bloodstream flooding a chorus of _no, no, no, no, no._ She prays to every god she doesn’t believe in. She let’s go of Ellie’s hand, the one she doesn’t realize she was still holding onto, and she shoves forward. 

“Lev?” she calls out, stalkers be damned. She moves further in, deeper, down to the edge of the cliff. And she sees him.

There are men on either side of him, holding him up against a wall near the exit of the cave. They are big – much bigger than him – and they are looking to the man standing in front of them who has a gun pointed right at Lev. “This isn’t the kinda place a girl like you should be, now is it?” the man asks with a thick southern drawl, and Abby is immediately reaching for her rifle and preparing to jump.

Ellie comes up behind her, over her shoulder, and her breath goes shallow. “Oh my god.”

One of the men reaches for Lev’s chest, grabbing and fondling where he shouldn’t be, and Lev crackles out a soft, “ _Stop_ ,” that turns Abby into a stick of dynamite.

"You don’t go pokin’ around in other people’s business,” the man with the gun tells him. “This is our land; this is where we mine. And ‘yer just some little bitch who needs to learn her manners.”

Ellie and Abby are moving in tandem, Abby firing two swift shots at the man with the gun while Ellie takes two headshots with her arrow to each of the men holding Lev. They jump off the landing, and Abby lets Ellie move for Lev while she goes straight for the man, lunging for him and sending him up against the wall.

“Who the fuck are you?” she snarls, and she knows she doesn’t have long before he’s bleeding out. She hits his groin with her gun, sending him to the ground and following him down. She grabs her blade and holds it to his throat. “Who the _fuck_ are you?” she repeats with venom on her tongue. “Who are you with? Because I am going to find them and I am not going to stop until every single one of them—”

He sputters, spitting at the ground and grinning at her with blood between his crooked teeth. “Wouldn’t you like to know, sweetheart?” he taunts her, and she plunges the blade into his throat.

" _Abby_ ,” Lev rasps, and she is releasing the dead weight from her grasp and letting him slump to the floor. She grabs her knife and she turns, reaching for Lev as he moves for her. She has a brief moment where she worries that he’s mad, but then she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a shit. Let him be mad – let him be furious and disappointed and every other emotion so long as he still has a beating heart between his ribs. But instead, he is reaching for her and she is grabbing back for him, crushing him to her chest.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and she knows her tears are in his hair, and she doesn’t care. “Are you fucking okay?”

“Abby, I’m sorry,” he cries, and it only makes her hug him harder.

She shakes her head, chin resting atop his head. “No,” she says with finality. “You don’t apologize to me, okay, kid? You don’t do that. I’m so fucking sorry, Lev.”

He hugs her tightly, grasping for the thinning material of her shirt, and she’d let him crawl inside of her skin if she could. Just to make sure he was safe. Just to make sure no harm could ever come to him.

* * *

“You’re still bleeding,” Lev points out, reaching forward with a rag and dabbing at the spot on Abby’s jaw.

Abby swats his hand away with a weak smile. “Kid, I’m fine.” She nods over to where Ellie is giving Kodak some water across the way. They’ve made a pitstop for the night, having finally made it to Texas after getting out of New Mexico. They were a little way outside of a town called San Angelo, and according to Lev’s map, they just might make it to Austin by late tomorrow night. They’d made sure to find him another map of New Mexico before they got out of the state, and it is safely tucked away in his bag.

She peeks back at him. “Are _you_?”

He groans. “You’ve asked me that twenty times in the last two hours. That’s ten times an hour.”

“Well, if you’d _answer the question_.”

He cracks a smile despite himself. “I’ve answered the question every time,” he tells her. “And I’m fine.” The smile doesn’t reach his eyes, but she can’t blame him. Her blood boils every time she thinks about what happened at the caverns, at how she could have stopped it if she could have just shut the fuck up for once in her life. “I promise.” He looks over at Ellie, at where she is turning back toward them. “It was pretty cool how she, like, headshot two guys with her bow like that.”

She drowns the green monster with acid. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it was.” She sniffs, looking down at the dirt beneath her boot. “She cares about you a lot, kid.”

“You guys saved me back there.”

The tears are stinging Abby’s eyes and she blinks fast, blinking them out of the way. “Well, we need you,” she says as if it’s the simplest answer in the world. “We’d kill each other without you.” She winces back at him sheepishly. “Too soon?’

Lev rolls his eyes, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the night sky, the clear sky and stars staring overhead. “I still can’t believe you got in a _fight_ over _me_.”

Abby kicks his ankle with the toe of her boot. “To be fair, I think it was over a lot of shit and you were just the catalyst.”

"The what?”

"The, like… the launch pad. The starting point.”

“Oh.” He looks back at Ellie, and she smiles at him. He turns back to Abby. “Are you okay now?”

Abby doesn’t have an answer. She doesn’t know if she ever will. She and Ellie haven’t really spoken one-on-one since they got out of Carlsbad, and she doesn’t necessarily know if they need to. Do they need to? She looks back at Lev and she smiles, leaning in so she can bump her shoulder to his. “I think we’re fine,” she says, regardless of whether or not that’s true. “We’re fine, ‘cause you’re fine.” A beat passes. “You _are_ fine, right?”

He groans, loud and over-the-top. “I’m going to bed,” he declares, but there’s a twinkle in his eye where there wasn’t one before. “Good night, Abby,” he says, and he’s standing up and heading toward the trailer that they’re calling home for the night. He calls out a goodnight to Ellie for the evening before disappearing inside.

Abby sits back up, grabbing her water bottle and taking a long swig from where she sits in front of the fire pit. Ellie, after a moment, is joining her, sitting on the log beside her.

“That was a fucking day,” she mutters, and Abby can’t help but laugh.

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “It was fucked up.”

They’re quiet for a stilled moment before Ellie’s voice splinters through it. “What those guys said back there? About Lev. Does that… does that happen a lot?”

Abby goes stiff from beside her, sitting up a little straighter. “No,” she says. “I mean, the Seraphites would say shit. Lev dealt with a lot before he left, but. No. Not really. But, I mean. He’s fifteen, you know? Shit’s happening, and he’s…”

“Growing up,” Ellie’s words are quiet. “Yeah.”

Abby’s elbows come to rest at her knees, fingers raking into her hair. “I just wish there was something I could do. I wish I fucking _knew_ what to do. And I don’t. You know how happy he was that you dyed his hair just because he doesn’t _look like himself_ anymore?” Abby’s voice crackled against the fire. “He lost his sister, his mom, and—”

“—you’re his people.”

Ellie says it without looking at her, says it as casually as if she was announcing her plans for the day.

Abby nods from beside her. “Yeah. I’m trying.”

“No,” Ellie corrects her, and now she is looking at her. Piercing straight through her, and it’s hard to believe that this was the same girl who had just told her this morning that she wished she’d killed her when she’d had the chance. “You are.”

The fire burns out, and they go to bed.

* * *

Texas, from what Abby can gather, is much greener than the other states that they have traveled through. Lev has found another guide book, which have now become even more sacred to him than his maps, and he is keeping it in a satchel slung across Artemis’ back. He finds two trading cards for Ellie at a rest stop and a Michigan quarter for Abby at an old diner, but he has stopped searching for any souvenirs of his own beyond his maps and his books. “It makes me look like a traveler,” he tells them with a proud smile.

Ellie smirks back at him. “I don’t think it makes you look like a traveler,” she clarifies, nudging Kodak closer ahead so that she’s sided up beside him. “I think you _are_ a traveler. You’ve come all the way from Washington to California to Texas. That’s a traveler.”

"You’ve gone farther,” Lev points out. “You’ve gone from _Boston_ across the whole country.”

“I’ve still got a couple years on you,” she tells him pointedly. “You’ll get there.”

Abby lets them talk amongst themselves for the time being, letting her own mind wander. They will be in Austin – or close to it – by nightfall, which means that this will be their last day traveling with Ellie. She feels stupid for letting her anxiety, her inner-maniac get the better of her yesterday and assuming that Lev was going to just jump ship and leave her on her own.

They are so close to their end goal, and she doesn’t want this to turn out like Santa Barbara. She doesn’t want to keep following clues for nothing, a paper trail that leads them nowhere. She doesn’t know how much more of the disappointment she can take. She is tired. She just wants to belong, _needs_ to belong – and she knows that Lev needs that, too.

“Let’s stop here,” Ellie calls out over her shoulder, stealing a look over at Abby. They are in an abandoned downtown district in a town called Brady, and Ellie is nodding her head toward a store with a faded, rusted sign that reads _Barely Thrifted_. She is bringing Kodak to a stop up front and Lev is following suit – which means that Abby is, as well.

"Is this a clothing store?” he asks, and Ellie’s only response is a nod.

She is leaning against the wall of the building, listening in by the window, before lifting her arm and swinging, busting the glass and hopping over the windowsill. “I don’t think my shoes are gonna last,” she points out. “They’re pretty fucked from the caves yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Abby scoffs, looking around the store and running her fingers along the arm of a silk shirt. “It’s the cave that did it.”

Ellie shoots her a look over her shoulder before she’s darting around the corner and disappearing under a sign that reads SHOES.

Lev looks at the walls of faded t-shirts and folded jeans, pulling up one that reads _THE ROLLING STONES_ and holding it up to Abby. “Look at this tongue,” he laughs, sticking out his tongue as far as he can. 

She laughs, shaking her head and snagging a large, patched denim jacket off of a hanger and pulling it on over her arms. She hasn’t had a jacket since Seattle, since she gave hers to Lev – not that she’s really needed one – and this one seems comfortable enough to fill the void. “You should probably grab some stuff,” she tells him. “Whatever you like, whatever will fit in your bag.”

An excited fire flickers in his eyes for a moment, and then he’s grabbing The Rolling Stones shirt, and a red and black plaid flannel. He goes for a pair of dark jeans and holds them up to himself in a mirror before folding them over his arm. They carry on like this for a few minutes, Ellie eventually joining them and grabbing a couple pieces, but mostly it’s the two of them watching Lev looking around his surroundings with awe vibrating off of his skin.

They’re about to head back out the door when Lev pauses, gaze trailing to a hat rack in the corner. “A _cowboy hat_ ,” he breathes out, and then he’s reaching for it and sticking it on his head. It’s a little big, sloping down over his forehead, but he’s smiling big and bright.

And that means it’s a perfect fit.

* * *

Lev keeps the hat on the rest of the way toward Austin, telling them that he’ll do the hunting for dinner because, “that’s just the cowboy thing to do,” before he’s hopping off Artemis and heading off through the brush with his bow and arrow.

They’re only a few miles outside of Austin, and they could probably just go the rest of the way in, but for some reason, they’re lingering. She doesn’t know why. She just knows that she can see the rundown skyline in the distance, even in the darkness of the night, and yet they’re stopping right here, right now, for a food break.

Abby climbs off of her horse, flashlight shining in Lev’s direction to make sure that she can see where he’s going. She hasn’t left him out of her sight for more than twenty seconds since New Mexico, and she plans on keeping it that way.

Ellie doesn’t seem much better, peering up over the rocks nearby to make sure that she sees what direction he’s headed. She turns her head to look at Abby. “We could probably just crash here tonight,” she says simply.

Abby pauses, turning back to look at her. “We’re, like, right by Austin.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “But… I don’t know. We don’t know what it’s going to be like there, and it’s probably better to not find that out so late at night, you know?”

Abby grimaces at the thought of another gang, of anybody like who was in the Carlsbad Caverns. Of bloaters lurking in the shadows or stalkers waiting behind walls. “Yeah, I guess,” she says decidedly.

It’s a few minutes later when Lev is returning with his bounty and Abby is preparing it for the night while Ellie and Lev work to set up camp for the evening.

It’s becoming a routine, Abby is starting to realize. The three of them. Almost a unit. Almost something.

* * *

Ellie is still awake when Lev falls asleep by the fire. She is fiddling with her journal, writing seemingly endless pages. Abby tucks Lev’s shoulders under one arm and his legs under the other, moving him to the shelter so that he can rest. She should get some sleep, and she knows that. She’s tired, is always tired, will always _be_ tired.

But, she moves back out to the fire. Back out to where Ellie is writing in her journal.

“Hey,” she says quietly, taking a seat close to her, but not close enough that Ellie would move away.

Ellie’s response is a hum, turning her page and starting a sketch.

“I could never keep up with a journal,” Abby says quietly, and she doesn’t know why the fuck she’s trying to have this conversation. Why she wants to have _any_ conversation. “I’ve tried.”

“It helps,” Ellie says, drawing an outline before shading it in. Abby realizes that it’s the campfire, a silhouette of a sleeping figure laying in front of it – Lev. “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

Abby leans back, looking up at the sky and the stars and breathing out slowly. “I, uh. I’m sorry. For yesterday.”

Ellie doesn’t look up from her book. “I’m the one who said I wished I’d killed you.” Her voice holds no humor, no malice. “I probably owe an apology somewhere in there, too.”

“Probably.”

“But maybe not.” 

“Maybe not.”

They’re quiet after that; Ellie keeps sketching, and Abby keeps looking up. She thinks that if she did believe in a heaven, that her dad would be up there – and he’d be watching her, watching this moment, wondering what the hell was going on with his daughter and how on earth so much could have shifted in such a seemingly short amount of time.

Abby knows that she can leave it right here – she knows that she should leave it right here. But there is a nagging feeling pulsing through her, and it is telling her that she cannot do that. That the words are sitting in her throat, and they are climbing higher and higher like bile, and that they are going to escape one way or another.

“You know,” she says, voice raspier than it was a few moments before, “I was there that day.”

Ellie’s pencil suddenly stills.

“In Utah,” she continues, even if it didn’t need clarification. “I was bringing my dad food, and he and Marlene were arguing. About Joel,” the name is heavy on her tongue. “About you. About how young you were, how dangerous it was. How reckless. What were you, fourteen?”

Ellie’s voice is a hollow note. “Yeah.”

“I was sixteen,” Abby continues, and she curls her fingers into her palms to keep them from shaking. “And I thought I knew everything.” She shakes her head, grabbing a stick from beside her and trailing it along the dirt. “I told my dad that if it was me, I would want him to do the procedure.”

From beside her, Ellie is a piece of glass.

Abby doesn’t know where she is going with this. She doesn’t know why she’s saying this, or what she’s expecting to gain from this, but it’s the most honest she’s felt in a long time, and it makes her want to keep going.

Ellie is speaking up before she gets the chance.

"I didn’t know,” Ellie says and the words sound like they’re coming straight from her lungs. “Until later. I didn’t know about… the operation, what it would mean. And I was mad at Joel for not giving me the choice.” From the corner of her eye, she could see Ellie wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I think I’m still mad at him. Isn’t that fucking stupid? I wanted my life to mean something. I wanted to matter. And he took that from me. He took away my significance, and then…”

 _And then you took away **him**_ , Abby can finish the sentence on her own.

She swallows, and she shakes her head. “The thing is,” Abby scratches out, “my dad wouldn’t have done it. He would’ve done the same thing Joel did. The same fucking thing.” The tears spring to her eyes and she tries to blink them away, but they’re hot under her eyelids and it proves fruitless. “It would’ve broken every Firefly code, and he would’ve done it anyway. The needs of the many are supposed to outweigh the needs of the few or the one, but if it was me, and I was on that table, he couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t care about the consequences. And I would’ve been so furious at him for it.”

Ellie’s knee is bouncing up and down in front of her, and Abby turns her head over her shoulder, looking at where Lev has shifted positions in his sleep. His cowboy hat is rested over his face and there is no sense in trying to stop the tears crackling in her voice.

“But when I look at him?” she says softly. “And what happened back in Carlsbad? And… and just the fucking thought of anything happening to him? I’d fucking rip cities apart to save him. I’d burn everything down. He’s my family.” She rubs at her eyes with the heels of her palm, and she feels like she’s going to vomit, like the bile of words hasn’t been relieved, but, rather, has moved lower, straight to the pit of her gut. “And I wish I’d known that before. I wish I’d known that then, but you can’t.”

Ellie is a firm line beside her. She looks down at her journal, and then she looks over her shoulder at where Lev is sleeping, and then she looks right at Abby. Her gaze isn’t as cold as Abby had a feeling it would have been, but that doesn’t mean it’s warm, either.

They stay like that for a moment, lifelines and currents pulsing between them, before Ellie stands up. “We should get some sleep,” she says with a soft finality. With defeat.

And then she turns, leaving Abby alone with the dulling flames and the weight of a thousand sinking ships in her bones.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ ONCE AGAIN, thank y'all so much for all of your kind words on this fic. (this was for all of u who wanted lev in a cowboy hat - you are VALID.)
> 
> i love u so much. see you on the next update. i hope you enjoyed. ❤


	6. his house is big.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the beginning of middle-ground, maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥️ my longest chapter ever!
> 
> do you ever fall over from your feelings? 
> 
> [you ever make an abby fan video and wallow in self-pity? suffer with me, friends.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV8lZCDoQ2Y&t=1s)
> 
> enjoy this chapter, i love u all so much. 
> 
> thank u for reading, thank u for going on this journey with me. ♥️

* * *

* * *

_two feet standing on a principle_

_two hands longing for each other’s warmth_

* * *

* * *

Joel used to carry a tattered envelope wherever he went. It was always in his pack, always folded and worn, ink practically illegible and paper as thin as soaked cloth. He always had it with him, before he even had a picture of him and Sarah to carry safely against his chest.

It had been a split-second decision, right before she left Jackson for the last time, to grab it from where his pack lay – untouched for well over a year – slumped in the corner where his bed once was. She knew that Joel’s house wouldn’t be _Joel’s_ house soon, that they wouldn’t hold onto a home for a ghost when so many people in the community could use the place to live, so if she wanted anything, she needed to grab it now.

After all, it wasn’t like she was planning to come back. It didn’t really seem like there was much waiting for her in Jackson. Not now. Not anymore.

And so, she reached into Joel’s pack – just one last time. She rooted around to the very bottom, to where the envelope sat tucked into an inner pocket alongside a lucky coin (that Ellie had never, not once, believed was actually lucky) and a rabbit’s foot (again, no luck, no fucking chance), and she pulled out that worn envelope. The letter inside had been nearly impossible to read, but it was what was written on the outside that she had needed the most:

_TO:_

_Sarah Miller_

_2156 Bumelia Springs_

_Austin, TX 78733_

_FROM:_

_Lydia Miller née Tatum_

_1893 Corfolk Creek_

_Lago Vista, TX 78645_

It is the address that she needs, that keeps her clutching onto the envelope, and not so much the letter inside it. The letter feels personal, like stepping into a piece of Joel’s life that she’s not supposed to. Like something he would rip away from her and tell her to stay away from. This is from another Joel, another part of his life, a pre-outbreak existence. A life where he still had his daughter, still had a life, and still had a chance, and still had _hope_.

But, Joel is gone now. That’s the thing. And during a particularly weak moment before she had reached Las Vegas, she had opened the letter for the very first time and read the words that didn’t belong to her and never would.

_February 6, 2013_

_Happy 12 th Birthday. I’m sorry that I can’t be there today to celebrate with you, but I promise to make it up to you this weekend. I love you so, so much, and I’m so proud of the young woman you are growing up to be. Your father and I love you so much, and I hope you know that. _

Ellie and her flashlight had spent nearly twenty-minutes deciphering the last line of the paragraph, the line smeared nearly beyond recognition before she could make it out.

_I hope you grow up to learn that sometimes love doesn’t work out the way you expect it to, but that doesn’t mean you should ever stop believing in it. I hope you grow up strong and brave and wild and loud and ferocious (And trust me, with me and your dad around? You’re in good shape for that!)._

_This is your final year before you’re a teenager – A TEENAGER! I can’t wait to watch you grow up. You are—_

The next part was smeared and blurred in a way that only tears could bring about, and it had almost made Ellie want to fold the paper back into the envelope and never, ever again open it back up.

_—always remember that I love you, and your dad loves you, and even if we’re going to hate every boy (or girl) you bring home, we will never, ever, ever stop loving you, baby girl._

_Happy Birthday, honey. Don’t let your old man eat all your cake._

_AND SAVE ME A SLICE._

_Love to every planet and back,_

_Your mama_

It is a letter that Ellie has only ever read once, and once has proven to be more than enough.

It’s hard to think about Joel, to think about Joel’s old life – his _real_ life. To think that he used to be just another dad like the kind she’s read about in books and seen in the few movies she’s been able to watch. A dad who would drive his daughter to soccer practice, who used to have a wife until they fell apart, who cooked on a fucking _grill_ and sang in the shower. The same Joel who hunted monsters with her in alleys and beneath city streets. The same Joel who killed a hospital full of doctors just to get her out of it alive. The same Joel who she watched die while she lay helpless, screaming and watching the light go out in his bloody, swollen eyes.

Right now, Ellie’s eyes are focused on the letter from where she sits atop Kodak, slowly trekking the rest of the way toward Austin’s city limits. Abby and Lev are somewhere up ahead, not by much, and there’s a knife twisting in the pit of Ellie’s gut at the fact that she’s somehow dragging her feet over this.

He’s so close, even if he’s gone. He’s _right fucking here_. He’s within grasp even if he hasn’t been “home” in almost thirty years and never will be “home” again.

She looks up from the envelope, from the address that is seared into her memory, and sees Lev looking back at her. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she says quickly, sliding the envelope back into the pocket of her jacket and nudging Kodak forward so that he falls into line with Lev. “How you holding up?”

Admittedly, she’s asked this more times over the last few days than she can keep track of. Lev was grabbed back in New Mexico, held at gun point, fucking _assaulted_. It still makes her skin crawl to think about, and judging by Lev’s light groan, he’s getting sick of the question.

“I’m fine,” he insists. “I can take care of myself.”

“Nobody’s saying that you _can’t_.” It’s Abby that has spoken up rather than Ellie, and judging by her exhausted tone, this is an argument that the two of them have been having for quite a while now while Ellie has been lingering in their dust. “All I’m saying is that—”

“—I get it,” Lev cuts her off. “I won’t run off blindly into another cave without giving you a smoke signal for where I’m going beforehand.”

Abby shoots him a dark look. “See, you _say_ that, and then you get that little stupid smile on your face like somehow this is _funny_ , and—”

“—it’s not,” he assures her. “It’s just funny to see you get worked up over me.”

Abby looks ready to topple off of her horse. “Kid, I _swear to God_.”

Ellie drifts back out, letting them bicker amongst themselves. Abby has been watching Lev like a hawk since they got out of the caverns in Carlsbad, and Ellie can’t even blame her. It nags on her, tugging on her sleeve like a petulant child, reminding her of Joel doing the exact same thing. She tries to shove those feelings aside as soon as they bubble up to the surface. They don’t deserve so much as a second thought.

The last suburb they stopped through, a dwindling suburb named Bee Cave that she’s sure was once beautiful, had been littered with infected, and Lev still had blood smeared across his cheek from a runner that he had taken down just as he had been racing back toward Artemis. It would be naïve to not all have their guard up – to not _always_ have their guard up – and know that Austin is probably not going to be any different.

Up ahead is a sign for a place called Barton Creek Habitat Preserve and before Ellie knows what she’s doing, she’s blurting out, “Let’s stop here.”

Abby halts mid-sentence. “ _Here_?”

“Yeah,” Ellie snipes back, and before Abby and Lev can argue, she’s cutting across the grassy highway and turning into the grove of trees. She and Abby don’t talk a lot, and frankly, Ellie likes it that way. Abby probably does, too. But they especially haven’t spoken since last night, since Abby told her all that shit about the hospital, about _Joel_. She didn’t need to hear about her guilt – it didn’t change anything; it didn’t change the situation. It didn’t bring Joel back. It didn’t _fix_ any problems.

She wishes that she had a word to explain the knot twisting in her gut, the way she feels like she could hurl at any given moment, how fucking sick she feels about being this close to Austin, how _stupid of an idea_ this had been. But she doesn’t have words for any of that. She just knows that she’s not ready. She wasn’t ready last night, when all of this could have been long over and done with. And she’s not ready now, either. They still have hours and hours of daylight looming ahead of them, and there is no rush. Right? Joel can’t come back to claim the house. _There is no rush_.

The sound of hooves behind her tells her that Abby and Lev are at her heels, and the blade inside of her twists a little deeper at the realization that at some point through all of this bullshit, they’ve all gotten into this together with one another.

Barton Creek is a long and winding river with white cliffs and rocky waterfalls that make Lev’s eyes light up. _See,_ the little nagging voice in Ellie’s gut prides itself, _we did a good thing coming this way._ She leads Kodak further up the trail and higher up the cliff, where signs are posted throughout about diving regulations.

From beyond the hills, Ellie can see Austin’s skyline waiting for her. She can see everything that she’s not ready for. But right here and right now, all she sees is a jump that’s waiting for her. She hops off of Kodak, pulling off one boot and then the other. “What do you say, Lev?”

Abby sits up higher on her horse, leaning around so that she can look hard at Ellie from where she is behind Lev. “ _What_?”

Ellie doesn’t look at her, keeping her gaze on Lev. “I’ll be right with you.”

Lev gapes back at her in shock, but he’s moving to get off of Artemis ever the same. “You mean, like, _jump_?”

"It’s not that high,” she promises him, and her voice is rattling with a newfound charge of electricity. “They wouldn’t have signs around here about diving if people didn’t do it.”

She feels frantic. She feels like she’s sixteen and going on her first solo hunt in Jackson to prove herself to Tommy and Joel and Seth, and she knows it’s the desperate desire to be anywhere but Austin that is fueling her, that is begging her to take the goddamn jump. She shucks off her jacket and her flannel and peels away her socks, leaving them to the side by Kodak and leaving her in her t-shirt and jeans.

“Lev,” Abby warns, but Lev is moving forward, and Lev is taking off his shoes, and Lev is moving closer to Ellie. _“Lev_. _”_

He turns back to look at her. “Abby, you should come.”

“Oh, no _fucking_ way,” Abby scoffs. She glares back at Ellie. “Are you out of your mind? He’s not _jumping_.”

“He’s _jumping_ ,” Lev shoots a look back at her, and then he turns back to Ellie. “So, we just… we just jump in?”

“Yeah,” Ellie says, bouncing from one foot to the other. Lev is already moving for the cliff’s edge before Abby calls out to him one last time.

He spins to face her, and she merely holds her hand out. “Your hat,” she says, voice caked in defeat.

Ellie lifts it off of his head and tosses it to Abby, turning back to look at Lev and reaching for his hand. “You ready?”

Lev nods back at her, but his hand is trembling against her palm. He turns his head to look back at Abby. “Abby, are you sure?”

Abby isn’t even looking at the cliffs. Isn’t even looking at _them_. “Don’t do anything fucking stupid and get right back up here,” is all she says, eyes focused on her horse’s mane.

Lev’s hand squeezes tightly against Ellie’s and he turns to give her one last look, one final nod of affirmation. She looks straight ahead, and together the two of them race forward, race to the edge of the rocks, and they jump – _soar_ – from the overhang. 

It’s like breathing for the first time in years.

* * *

“You’re fucking insane, you know that right?” Abby confirms as she passes Lev a dry pair of clothes to change into. Lev takes one look between Ellie and Abby before he’s ducking behind a tree to get changed with a flush across his cheeks.

“It was _fun_ ,” Ellie hears him saying from around the corner. “It’s almost like I’m not even scared of the water anymore, and I think it’s because I was more focused on the fact that it felt like I could’ve been _falling to my death_!”

Abby’s gaze is immediately honed in on Ellie. “ _Falling to his death_ ,” she repeats.

“He’s _fine_ ,” Ellie groans, combing the short strands of her hair into a small ponytail and pulling the sleeves of her jacket back on over her damp shirt. She reaches her hand into the pocket of her jacket a moment later, just in case the envelope had somehow grown legs and walked away while she’d been gone. As soon as her fingers curl over the papered edges, she closes her eyes. Joel’s face is looking back at her, and she knows what’s coming next. All the fuck over again. Just like that.

Lev is rejoining them at the horses, smoothing down his shirt on three separate occasions before he’s climbing back up on Artemis and giving Ellie a small, secret smile. Almost like they’re friends. Almost like they just shared something special.  
  


* * *

They pass the rusted and decaying _Austin Welcomes You_ sign, weaving their horses through the lines of overgrown vehicles that never made it off of Highway 71. Lev’s shoulders are already stiffening from where he sits atop Artemis, hand absently fiddling with the base of his bow from where it’s slung across his back. Every ounce of relaxation he’d been carrying with him from Barton Creek has been replaced with the familiar sense of dread and anticipation that they so often carry in their back pocket.

The large metal gate of a worn-down Quarantine Zone looms overhead and Ellie hops off of Kodak for a moment to investigate the entrance. The grass and gravel crunches beneath her black boots – a trade in for her tattered-up Converse that would make Dina proud – and she finds herself faced with no foreseeable way in. She peers over her shoulder at Abby and Lev. “I’m gonna look for a way in, hang back,” she says, like she’s always said. Like she had said so many times before with Riley, with Jesse and with Dina. She’s grown accustomed to doing things on her own, learning to be self-sufficient and reliant on her own bones.

What she doesn’t expect, what she _hasn’t_ grown accustomed to, is hearing footsteps dropping to the ground from behind her. She turns around as she approaches a watch tower, seeing Abby and Lev going up to the one across from her and climbing up the ladder. When Abby’s gaze meets her own, it’s a shrug that she offers in return. “It’ll go faster if we’re all looking.”

“Plus, Abby will just ask me if I’m okay—”

“ _—Lev.”_

The snort that escapes Ellie is entirely involuntary, and she quickly turns back to the watchtower, climbing up the ladder and pushing herself up into the bird’s nest at the top to see if there is anything of use that will help them get inside.

"You got anything?” Abby calls from across the highway, and Ellie is rooting around in the drawers with no such luck.

She shakes her head back toward where Lev and Abby are staring across the tower. “There’s gotta be a generator around here,” she says. She opens one final drawer in confirmation and sees nothing that will help them. She does, however, find a folded-up map of Austin and snag it for Lev to add to his collection.

And if there’s a Texas quarter on the bottom rung of the ladder that Ellie picks up before she goes to rejoin Abby and Lev, that’s her business.

* * *

There is a generator well-hidden behind a grove of trees that turns out to be the solution to their problems, and Ellie helps Lev track down the cable so that they can get it connected to the power source.

“Does this mean that there isn’t a lot going on in the city?” he asks her as they’re making their way back to the generator. “If you have to plug everything in like this?”

Ellie shakes her head. “It’s the same way in a lot of places,” she tells him. “Everything stays barricaded and locked up inside so that you can’t get in from the outside unless you really know how to.” She pauses for a moment as Lev crouches down to plug the cord into the socket. “You never really got far out of Seattle, did you?”

“No,” he says simply, but not with much bitterness or sadness in his voice. “I stayed at the camps, mostly. With Yara,” his voice lags a little at the sound of his sister’s name rolling off his tongue. “But it’s okay.”

It makes sense. Why he is so eager to see everywhere they go, why he always takes the longer routes when hunting. Why he jumped off that cliff even when he’s still so afraid of the water. He’s skilled, but he’s sheltered – he’s absorbing the world around him piece by piece in a way that he never got to before he left Washington.

He pulls the generator with one, two, three firm tugs before it rumbles to life and Abby is calling out from beyond the trees that the button to activate the door has lit up. Ellie places her hand on Lev’s shoulder, reaching into her bag. “I grabbed you something,” she says, pulling out the Austin map and handing it to him. “To add to your collection.”

Lev smiles back at her, almost hesitantly, before he’s turned to a cartographer, charting out his next travels. “Thank you, Ellie,” he tells her, saying this like this is a much more exciting gift. “I’ll take good care of it.”

She takes a long look at him, then. His newly bleached blond hair, his oversized cowboy hat and the baggy t-shirt he picked up at an old thrift shop along the way. He is night and day from the boy she saw for the first time the night in the theatre in Seattle, when she’d had fire swimming in her veins and he’d been the reason Dina had been spared. He seems alive.

Her mind flashes back to Carlsbad, to the look of hurt and realization that flickered in his eyes when Abby told him about the blade Ellie had held to his throat. It didn’t look like surprise, not really. More like hurt, like the phantom pains of an old scar opening back up. She never wanted to see that look on his face again – never wanted to be the _reason_ for that look on his face ever again.

“Any day now,” Abby hollers from up ahead, and Lev picks up the pace to jog up to her, leaving Ellie following behind. Austin is behind the doors of the Quarantine Zone. Somewhere out there, somewhere beyond those doors lies 2156 Bumelia Springs – the final pieces of a fucked-up puzzle.

* * *

  
  
Ellie remembers Joel talking to her about Austin during their days on the road, on their journey from the East Coast to the Rockies. He’d called it the “Seattle of the South” as if she had any fucking idea what that meant.

She does now. The city is wide-spread and detailed, sectioned off into quarantine zones and districts that don’t look like they have been used much in the past decade. 

There are faded signs posted on walls throughout the desolate city: _KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD_ they read on tattered, tie-dyed paper. Lev carefully takes one of the posters down and folds it up, sliding it into his backpack.

Abby nudges his shoulder with her own. “Gonna have to get you a suitcase.”

“You’ll just have to start carrying stuff for me.”

“What do I look like, your _butler_?”

Lev shoves her and she shoves him back before the two of them are climbing back onto their horses and Lev is peering over his shoulder, eyes focused back on Ellie. “Do you know where we’re headed?”

 _We_. The word sticks out to her.

When she had initially been planning this trip, she hadn’t been planning it with anyone else in accompaniment – least of all _Abby and Lev_. Abby’s gaze goes cloudy, focus turning back to the city surrounding them. Ellie keeps her attention on Lev before she’s reaching into her pocket for the envelope from Lydia. “Yeah, I have the address here,” she offers up, and Abby clears her throat and nudges her horse further, faster.

Lev hangs back long enough that Ellie and him are in sync with one another, allowing Abby to go off ahead as if she has any clue where she’s going. Ellie’s gaze trails her around the corner of Austin’s downtown district before she and Lev are following her. Lev opens up his map, reaching over for the letter still pinched between Ellie’s fingertips. For a second, she jolts away.

“Sorry,” his eyes go wide in alarm, and she’s quickly shaking her head, passing the envelope to him with an unsteady hand. He stalls on Artemis, coming to a stop near a light pole and calling out for Abby to slow down. “Bumelia Springs,” he reads out, and his eyes narrow with concentration as he pours over every intersection on the map. It’s a full city map, laying out the different neighborhoods and streets with small, yellow and red and blue lines. Lev is following along with his finger before pointing out the landmark for The Driskill Hotel on the map. “That’s where we are.” From ahead of them, just on the corner of Congress Avenue and East Seventh stood the gothic, brick building, two ripped and ragged flags still hanging sadly out front among the rubble and cracked pillars.

His finger trails further, weaving through more of the downtown districts into another area of suburbs. “The Bumelia is a type of tree,” he tells her, giving her a knowing look that tells her that she should already _know this_ somehow. “I read about it in the book we picked up outside of New Mexico. “They’re called Bully trees. And…” he trails off for a second, finger landing on another cluster of street names. “These are all named after trees. See? Maple, Pine, Chestnut, White Oak, Black Ash, Aspen, Balsam, Larch…” his voice trails off, and then it lifts. It fills with hope, a smile quirks at the corner of his mouth. “Bumelia.”

_Bumelia, Bumelia, Bumelia._

* * *

It is well over an hour of wandering through the downtown sections of Austin. They don’t make many stops, although Ellie considers nearly all of them. She contemplates asking about stopping at every pharmacy and corner store and old bakery, just to make the time go by a little slower, just to prolong the inevitable.

It’s Abby, finally, who brings up stopping. They are getting away from the grid of the downtown district and everything is a little bigger, a little more spaced out, and Abby is pointing toward the parking lot of a superstore called _Save-Its._ She turns her head to look at Lev before briefly glancing back at Ellie. “Probably a good place to check for supplies.”

“Yeah,” Ellie agrees, probably too quickly than what Abby’s used to judging by the way she blinks back at her in surprise, but Ellie pushes on with Kodak, trotting a little ahead of them and through the wasteland parking lot.

Lev looks back up at the store, at its crumpling brick structure and green and white lettering, before he’s turning his head back toward Abby and Ellie. “Places like this are probably really emptied out.”

“We can still check,” Ellie chirps, and she hates the way her voice sounds. She hates that when she blinks, she hears Joel’s voice. The bile is at the tip of her tongue just being in the same zip code as his house, as the place where his daughter died, in the same city where his journey started. She leads Kodak toward the front and hops off, waiting for Abby and Lev to follow suit before she’s forging ahead.

There are large glass windows, a few knocked over shopping carts along the slabs of concrete. Gnarled vines coat the edges of the building and some of the windows and doors have been boarded up over the years, but there is already a caved-in door underneath a faded decal that reads PRODUCE, and Ellie knows that they have their way in. She is already making her way forward when Lev falls into step beside her. “Hey,” he says cautiously, wariness coating his voice. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. Because today has been normal. Because today she hasn’t felt unhinged or foreign in her own skin at all. Because she’s always known herself to be so many things and a coward has never been one of them. She turns to look at Lev, and Lev’s eyes are still poring back into her. “Yeah, I’m good. Just figured it’d be good to stop somewhere like this.” A beat. “Just in case.”

He nods, a little uneasily, but Ellie is already ahead of him. She is crouching down low in front of the building for one, two, six breaths, listening close to make sure that they are safe to enter, and then squeezing through the gap between the doors. Lev follows quickly behind her, and there’s a soft grunt that follows and metal creaking quickly after that as Abby pushes the doors further apart so that she can squeeze through.

"We’re running low on supplements,” Abby says, already back in business mode and slinging her pack higher up on her shoulder. “And we should see if they have—”

They haven’t even made it through the vestibule before they hear it. Unmistakable and shrill. The juddering song of a clicker.

“Demons,” comes softly from Lev, and he’s dodging low, behind a knocked over recycle box with his bow and arrow already poised. 

Ellie can see the clicker, mutated and overgrown and teetering past an empty display rack. It pauses for a moment, blindly turning its head to observe its surroundings, before its screaming higher, louder. Alerting others. A shambler lumbers forward, sending a spare shelf falling forward and clattering to the ground – trickling a domino effect. Another shambler, another clicker, a ravenous runner.

“Shit, they’re everywhere,” Abby notes with exhaustion. She’s swiftly reaching into her bag for a pipe bomb, and for a brief moment, Ellie imagines this entire building bursting into flames with all of them inside. And then she’d _never_ have to go to Joel’s house.

She admonishes the thought quickly, reaching for a trap mine and grabbing her bow.

Ellie comes up behind the clicker, pressing the grip of her bow against its throat and driving her shiv into the jugular, sending it crumpling down to the ground in a pile of rotted flesh and ash. She spins around, crouched low and places the trap mine close to one of the shamblers rumbling past.

From behind her, Lev has taken down the runner with a single headshot and is moving for the second clicker. Abby has thrown her pipe bomb in the path of the shambler in the corner, dodging between Ellie and Lev to fire two incendiary shotgun shells at the beast. It blows up in a blitz of fire and blasts, the other shambler quickly being alerted – but not quick enough, landing in Ellie’s trap mine and exploding in a wave of overgrown appendages.

“Are there anymore?” Lev asks, lifting his head from the clicker’s corpse.

Ellie peers around the hollowed-out aisles, not hearing any other movements, before shaking her head back at him. “Not that I can see from here, at least,” she tells him. “Keep an eye out.”

Lev catches up to Ellie and Abby, the three of them heading for the pharmacy section and checking over their shoulders all the while. “Always do.”

* * *

They’re able to find a few packs of supplements and some bandages at Save-Its, along with a few canned food items and toiletries that had been long left forgotten amidst all the chaos of years’ past. Every bounty is carefully secured within their packs before they are making their way back out of the store, Ellie only able to stall them for so long.

"We’re really close,” Lev points out to her as they’re riding out of the parking lot. She convinced them to stop for a water break for the horses, but now he’s pointing out the street names – and they’re named after plants, flowers. Trees are sure to be following. “Close to Joel’s house.”

“Yeah,” Ellie says with a brick in her gut. “Really close.”

His eyes cautiously stay on her as they round go around another bend. He’s studying his map as Artemis slowly canters ahead and Ellie tries to remember what a normal pulse feels like. There is no feasible reason to be this nervous, to feel this unnerved. It’s just a house, but it’s _his_.

Ellie’s head lifts as she sees them pass Pine Street and round the corner to Maple Crest. Lev looks up ahead and calls out to Abby. “It’s the next street,” he tells her, and Ellie’s stomach flips inside-out.

 _Bumelia_ _Springs._

Each house looks almost the same, and yet different. Most of the houses are boarded up with slats of wood and many of them seem to nearly be grown all the way into the grown, grass sticking high in the air like weeds. Cars are left abandoned, bikes knocked over on the sidewalks next to busted open fire hydrants. They pass 2130, and 2142, and 2148, and the queasy pull in Ellie’s gut tightens into a hard, iron knot. She doesn’t need to look at the numbers to see which one is Joel’s. His house is white, a kickout on the side and two, peaked windows at the top. There are dark patches of grass and brush crawling up the siding and a chipped blue garage door.

It’s Joel’s. _She knows_ it’s Joel’s.

It’s enough to make everything go dark, to go hazy.

Kodak stops moving, or maybe she does. The whole world goes to a standstill around her, and she can only barely make out Lev saying her name.

"You good?” a voice asks, but it’s not Lev. It’s Abby. _Abby_? Asking _her_? If she’s _good_? That’s fucking rich.

Ellie brings Kodak to a stop near the mailbox. It reads _The Millers_ , but it’s so worn that it’s barely there. But it’s there. She blinks away the tears that are stinging her eyes and hops off of her horse, staring up at the house standing in front of her. Her hands are shaking, and out of a nervous tick, she curls the three fingers on her left hand into an unsteady fist. She looks back at Abby and Lev, but they’re not getting down. What the fuck now?

_What the fuck now?_

She didn’t plan this out. She didn’t plan any of this out.

All she had planned when she had made this decision back in Jackson was getting to Austin. That was as far as her train of thought had gotten. And here she is, looking at Joel’s old house, looking at the lifetime that Joel lived before he knew her, before _everything else_ , and now what. _Now what?_

She swallowed hard, placing her right hand over her left to try and quell the tremble before her gaze betrayed her and traveled back to Abby and Lev. Lev’s eyes were on her, and Abby’s were on Lev.

“If we leave now, we can probably make it past I-45 by dark,” Abby points out, sending a wave of pinpricks through Ellie’s bloodstream.

Lev pauses for a moment, turning to look back at Abby. “Oh.”

_Oh._

Abby won’t look at Ellie, won’t look at the house in front of her. She will only look at Lev, only look at familiar and trusted territory. Lev’s eyes travel back to Ellie, staring in silence for a long few seconds that stretch into what feel like hours.

This is the way that it is supposed to be. This is _how_ it’s supposed to be. This is exactly where their paths were meant to diverge – in fact, there is no reason at all that their paths should have ever crossed in the first place. So, it makes sense that they part ways here. It makes sense that Abby and Lev go one way and Ellie stays right here, right in place, alone in Joel’s house with the ghosts of Joel and Sarah and every mistake she’s ever made haunting her from over her shoulder. Abby and Lev find the Fireflies in Galveston, and Ellie stays right here, alone, like she’s supposed to.

That’s the way that it’s supposed to be, and yet Ellie’s voice is moving faster than her mind, faster than her entire body, and saying, “You could stay here tonight.”

Lev’s head immediately perks like a dog with a bone. “Yeah, we could.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Abby quickly counters. Her eyes finally meet Ellie. “Thanks, but no. We’re not staying here.”

Lev leans back with pause, turning his head to look back at Abby. “We should stay,” he suggests. “We could use the rest.”

“We can rest when we get to Galveston.”

“ _Abby_.”

Abby looks at Lev, long and hard and tired. If Ellie has learned anything about Lev and Abby’s dynamic over these couple weeks, it’s that Lev wins. Lev wins a lot. Lev wins all the time, and Abby would probably never admit it.

Reluctantly, with a tremor in her gaze, Abby looks up at Joel’s house. Ellie tries to picture it – tries to picture Abby in Joel’s home as if she has any right whatsoever to be there, as if she should get to stand where he’s stood, where Sarah once stood. What unnerves her more is the smallest, most minute glimmer of a glimpse – that she _can_ see Abby there.

"You should stay,” Ellie says, the words tasting like the harshest liquor on her tongue. “Just for tonight.”

Abby looks at Ellie uneasily – almost _fearfully_ – and then at Lev. “Just for tonight.”

* * *

Joel’s front door isn’t locked, and it fills Ellie overwhelmingly with relief, because the idea of smashing a window to his home makes her want to throw up. Realistically, she knows that his house has probably been picked through like a carcass, that it’s not going to bear any sort of resemblance to what it once looked like. But it’s still his home, it’s like walking on holy ground. Lev is right beside her as she leans against the doorway to make sure she doesn’t hear any sounds coming from inside. Abby is hovering on the walkway, not even approaching the front porch steps, as if she’s worried that she’ll burst into flames as soon as she crosses the threshold.

“It’s not a salt circle,” Ellie clips drily, and Abby fires a scowl back at her, but steps up onto the porch ever the same, still hanging back behind them.

One breath, two breaths, Joel’s rugged voice flowing through her head.

_If it ain’t got teeth, it can’t bite ya, kiddo._

Her hand trembles on the doorknob, and she presses down on the latch, pushing it open and stepping inside.

Anticlimactic would be an understatement, as at first glance, it truly looks just like every other house that she’s been in and out of over the past twenty years. Torn up, warped wood floors and ragged rugs, broken mirrors and art hanging on the walls, molded walls and caved-in ceilings. Her fingers trail absently along the sideboard table that lines the wall in the foyer. There is a metal bowl in the middle that still has a set of keys inside and a plastic card advertising something called _The Box Office: 24-Hour Video Store_. Joel’s name is neatly printed on the bottom line of the card.

Ellie swallows the lump forming in her throat, and her bag drops to the floor. All of her weapons fall to the side, her jacket slides off her shoulders. Every part of her body goes calm for the first time in a long time, like he’s here with her. Lev places a hand on her forearm, but she moves ahead, going around the corner into the living room. There’s a large, leather couch and one, lone bunny slipper wedged underneath a coffee table. The television in the corner has a crack in the middle and the glass cabinet has been shattered open and emptied out, but the picture hanging on the wall is a school picture – _Sarah’s_ school picture – and it’s still intact without a scratch on it. She’s smiling proudly with a bright blue top and short blonde hair in a bun at the top of her head, the year _2012-2013_ etched at the corner of the frame.

Holding her breath, she trails her finger along the frame, seeing the kitchen up ahead and walking toward it on shaking legs.

There are broken dishes in the sink, a bowl beside it with a cracked cell phone inside. A torn-up class schedule and a science textbook that has so much dust settled into it it’s practically grown into the countertop. It’s like a museum, a Joel-and-Sarah-Miller exhibition that’s been left just for her.

She turns to look over her shoulder, seeing that Abby and Lev are hovering back behind her. Abby is still in the front entryway, near the door, and Lev is perched on the arm of the couch, watching her with concern in his eyes.

Off of the kitchen is an office with two smashed-in French doors. There are a few scattered bones on the carpet near a computer desk, a shoe and a t-shirt and two bullets, as if someone was taken down here some time ago and then left to the Earth and its creatures to reclaim and collect.

It goes on like that, Ellie exploring with soft and silent curiosity. She looks through the garage, finds an old fishing pole and a toolbox and a picture of Joel and Tommy from when they were toothy children that she tucks away into the pocket of her jeans. The staircase isn’t blocked off, but she’s hesitant to make the journey upstairs – she knows what has to be up there: Sarah’s room, Joel’s room. Whatever mementos are left to leave her sick to her stomach.

Abby is still in the foyer as Ellie makes her way to the staircase, and Ellie pauses with her hand on the railing. She should leave her alone, and she knows this. She knows that she doesn’t care, shouldn’t care, but she’s speaking up anyway. “You can move, you know.”

“I’m fine.”

Abby is looking at her, somehow hard and soft at the same time, and Ellie blinks back up at the stairs. She has more important things to concern herself with. “Suit yourself.”

With her heart strangled somewhere between her lungs and her guts, she makes her way upstairs, toward the hallway. She can see Sarah’s door at the end, busted open, but a sign knocked down on the floor in front of the entryway that reads _SARAH!_ in big, bold letters.

She decides to go there first. She decides it’ll hurt less.

Ellie doesn’t realize that she’s been holding her breath until she’s stepping inside and releasing it in one uneven and drawn out exhale. Sarah’s room has been turned over multiple times, a twin-sized mattress with a hole cut straight through the middle flipped on its head in the middle and a broken mirror in pieces across the snagged carpet. Her closet door is ripped off its hinges, a turned over laundry basket with a pair of soccer cleats and a deflated ball parked against it. She has posters on her walls, but some are ripped off or hanging by only one thumbtack. There are still cases for DVDs and CDs on her bookshelves, a copy of _Savage Starlight_ spread open at her desk.

On a corkboard is a picture of a toddler-sized Sarah and who must be Tommy, all shaggy blond hair and a broad smile, Sarah propped on his knee and sticking her tongue out. She picks up the picture hanging beside it – Joel and Sarah, taken when Sarah was maybe eight or nine. There is a woman in the picture as well, honey blond hair pinned back. She and Joel have their arms folded around Sarah and they look happy – they look so goddamn happy.

She thinks back to the letter, to the envelope in her pocket. Is this Lydia? Is this Sarah’s mother? Joel’s ex-wife? Ellie holds the photo carefully between her fingertips, the most delicate thing she’d held since JJ’s pinkie, and makes her way out of Sarah’s room and further down the hall.

The bedroom around the corner doesn’t have a door anymore, and even if it’s sparse-looking now, she has a feeling that it’s never been all that cluttered to begin with. There is a metal contraption in the corner with black foot pedals and mold crawling up the sides, planting it into the carpet. His bed frame is splintered and his mattress is broken down on the floor. There is a broken lamp, a photo of Sarah on his dresser in her soccer uniform. A spare wallet in an open drawer, a photo of wolves hanging above where his bed once sat.

And there. There peeking out of the closet, under a few fallen pairs of pants, is the neck of a guitar.

Ellie’s stomach lurches tightly and she moves to the white doors, not nearly as busted apart as Sarah’s had been. She shoves hard, pushing the door open until it’s crumpling under her touch, not needing much of a push to fall apart underneath her. She ignores it, pushing aside the pants and reaching for the guitar. Reaching for something so gently and inexplicably _Joel_ – something that has always, always been Joel. As she pulls it away, safely in her grasp, a plaid shirt falls from a lone hanger and lands atop her hands. She sits the guitar down long enough to grab for the shirt, and then she’s following the guitar down, down to the floor, and folding the shirt around her like a hug she hasn’t felt in so fucking long.

The shirt doesn’t smell like Joel. It probably hasn’t smelled like Joel in twenty-five years. It just smells old. It doesn’t smell like sweat, or dirt, or _anything_ but an old closet and decay, but it’s his, and it’s _here_ , and she shrinks into it like a violet.

Ellie's tears are following quickly, swallowing her whole, consuming her alive in the way that they have been wanting and waiting to do for so long. “I’m sorry,” her voice catches and crackles, and she squeezes the shirt tighter. She curls into the corner of his closet and takes the shirt with her, pulls the guitar in with her foot, brings every piece of him with her that she can. “I’m so sorry.”

Her world grows small, and still, and quiet. Joel’s voice goes soft in her head until it’s nothing more than a dull throb. She doesn’t know how long she stays there, until her eyes are swollen and her throat is raw. 

Until she hears a soft and familiar voice asking, “Ellie?”

Her head lifts and she can see a soft shadow of a silhouette cast by Lev’s flashlight in the doorway. “I just wanted to check on you,” he continues quietly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t spring back into action like somebody who’s been caught doing something they’re not supposed to. She stays in place, stays in the nook of his closet with the safety net of his shirt. “Yeah, I’ll be out in a second.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her, but he doesn’t walk out of the room. He approaches the closet, and he sits down outside the door. They stay like that for a few moments, in silence across from one another, and she takes in his side profile, the angle of his jaw and his long eyelashes. “Sometimes, Abby will say that she needs to go look for supplies, but it’s because she knows I need to be alone,” he quietly notes. “And I know that it’s because she needs to be alone, too.”

Faces flash through her mind – every former Firefly in Seattle, Dina, JJ, Tommy, _Joel, Joel, Joel_. She closes her eyes tightly and shoves her arms into the sleeves of his shirt like a straitjacket. “Yeah,” is all that she can say back to him. She can’t and won’t meet his gaze. “Yeah, me too.”

He looks at her soberly before standing back up. “But I’m here, okay? And…” he trails off for a second. “Well. I’m here,” he traces back. “If you need someone to talk to. I think that we need that sometimes, even if we don’t think we do or don’t want to. It’s good to talk.”

Ellie’s knees fold against her chest. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

And then Lev gets up and leaves her in the darkness with Joel’s ghost and a baggy piece of cotton.

* * *

It could be minutes or hours or days before she goes back downstairs, Joel’s shirt properly hanging off of her thin frame and the neck of his guitar held firmly in her good hand. Lev’s eyes lift from where he and Abby are sitting on the floor of Joel’s living room with two flashlights and a dealt deck of cards between them.

“Hey,” Lev greets her, sitting up a little higher when he sees her approaching.

Ellie’s eyes travel down to the hands of cards. “What are you doing?” she asks.

"Abby’s been trying to teach me how to play Blackjack,” Lev points out proudly.

“Emphasis on _trying_ ,” Abby adds on under her breath, before her gaze is lifting back up to look at Ellie, and then at the guitar in her hand, and then back at her. “Doing okay?”

It’s the second time she’s asked that tonight, and Ellie still doesn’t know how to respond. She just nods her head slightly and pretends this isn’t one of the most bizarre situations she’s ever been in. “Yeah,” she says, throat dry as the word is forced out. “Fine.”

She knows that her eyes have to be puffed-up and red, but it’s dark enough in the room that she doubts Abby and Lev will really notice – or care, for that matter. She takes a seat on the couch, sitting higher than Abby and Lev, but right between them. “You can deal me in,” she offers weakly after another second. “I’m pretty good.”

“Well I _suck_ ,” Lev bemoans. “But maybe Abby’s a shitty teacher.”

“Hey, _watch it,”_ Abby snipes, reaching over and swatting Lev upside the head. Lev grins back at her, and for a second – just a small one, barely-there – Ellie thinks that she just might miss them when they leave in the morning.

Lev, at least.

* * *

Ellie wins by a landslide and Lev loudly declares with fingers jabbed accusingly at Abby that she is _forbidden_ from teaching him how to play anymore card games.

“You are setting me up for _failure_ , Abigail,” he proclaims, and she drops her jaw at the usage of her full name, tossing her entire hand of cards at him like a flurry of fallen leaves. Lev’s laugh bounces off the walls, and Ellie’s convinced that it’s the first time this house has heard a sound like that in decades.

* * *

“Do you know how to play?” Lev asks quietly.

He’s lying on the couch now. Abby is flipping through a tactical manual that she picked up at Save-Its and Ellie is sitting across from her with her back pressed against a chair and her fingers absentmindedly resting across the fretboard.

"I used to play a lot,” she says with a shrug. “I haven’t for a while.”

“Is it something you forget?” he asks. “There’s an expression about not forgetting things if you’ve learned them—”

“—like riding a bike,” Abby says without looking up.

“Yeah,” Lev agrees. “Like that. Is it like that?”

“I don’t know,” she says, left hand twitching uneasily. “I haven’t really tried in a long time. It’s hard to play with three fingers.”

Abby goes still from across the living room.

Lev nods in understanding, and Ellie realizes that this is surely a conversation that he and Abby have discussed at length. Did Abby brag about it? Did she brag about biting her fingers off and spitting them out into the Pacific Ocean like cherry pits? As if that was something normal people just fucking _did?_ “Maybe we could learn how to play together.”

Ellie’s gaze drops down to the guitar, and before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s properly pulling it into her lap and plucking at each individual chord, twisting it along with the pegs to get them tuned properly.

Lev smiles weakly, leaning back against the arm of the couch. “See?” he points out. “It sounds like music already.”

He’s lulled to sleep within minutes.

* * *

Ellie tries to journal, tries to get out any of the thoughts that are rolling around in her head about the monumental fuckery that’s been staring back at her all day, but all she can get out is: _His house is big._ That’s it. _His_ fucking _house is big_.

Abby has barely moved from her spot in the corner of the living room. She finished the tactical guide a while back and has been playing rounds of solitaire with her card deck. She hardly looks at Ellie, checks on Lev every few minutes from the corner of her eye. Ellie could get up and leave, could go upstairs and sleep in Joel’s room or Sarah’s room if she wanted to be pathetic and even more miserable than she already is. Instead, she stays put. 

She has shifted from the floor to the chair, and Joel’s freshly tuned guitar is resting across her lap. Her pitiful excuse for a journal lay open in front of her, empty and wordless.

“You know what’s fucked up?” her mouth moves faster than her mind, betraying her all over again.

Abby looks up. Ellie doesn’t look back.

“I think he would’ve liked you.”

* * *

The words flow out of her late in the night, or early in the morning, streaming from her pencil and onto the page. Lev is curled up on the couch with a blanket that Ellie found from a hall closet draped over him and Abby has relocated to the couch in the den – probably to get away from Ellie and her bitter one-liners.

She has drawn his house in the corner, the way it maybe once was, with a tire swing hanging off of the big oak tree in the front yard and a little girl holding onto the rope. There is the shape of a man standing on the porch, a woman beside him.

_I wonder about you_

_The way that winter wonders about fall_

_Always waiting for the day when they’ll meet_

_But killing its colors in the process._

_I am a wanderer on a path_

_And I will wander off the edge_

_And my darling if you come with me_

_You will be a victim of my existence_

_You are a wonder_

_And I am a wanderer_

_I will wonder about you_

_While I wander without you_

It’s about Dina, she’s sure. Or maybe it’s about JJ. Or maybe it’s about Riley or Kat or a love she’s never known – a warning to all who ever could or ever would love her.

Why would they, how could they?

* * *

When Ellie stirs in the morning, she’s sure she hasn’t slept for more than thirty minutes. Joel’s guitar is propped against her knee, and she sits up only to find that Lev’s blanket is neatly folded on the couch cushions. His bag is no longer against the coffee table. Abby’s pack is gone from the doorway into the living room.

She shoots up quickly, in what could almost be mistaken as a panic. “Lev?” she calls into the empty house. _Empty_. It’s empty. She knows it’s empty. She can’t hear any movement, can’t sense anything around her.

No fucking way would they just _leave_.

She bolts into the foyer, out the screen door and the front door, and sees Kodak standing alone in front of the house.

_No fucking way._

Her heart hammers in her chest, closing in on her. It happens the way that it always happens – the sinking feeling, the familiar abandonment to which she’s grown so accustomed. It happens every time and she’s still knocked over without fail. Even when she should expect it, even when she shouldn’t _care_.

Lev’s face echoes through her mind, his timid smile, his gentle soul.

And there, folded into the frame of the screen door, is a folded up piece of paper.

 _Ellie,_ the note reads, _there is a farm down the road that we saw last night. We’re getting eggs! -Lev_

And like clockwork, coming back down the road are two horses – one with a name and one without – and Abby and Lev.

* * *

Abby is frying eggs in a skillet and Lev is telling Ellie about the owners of the farm down the road. “They said there’s a community in a town up ahead,” he tells her. “It’s called Lago Vista? Apparently they have a whole _ecosystem_ there. Farming, community, small businesses. It’s like they’ve been rebuilding ever since the pandemic first broke out.”

The name sticks out to her, but she’s distracted by watching Abby move around the kitchen with ease, with determination and concentration. She’s sliding eggs out of the skillet with a spatula she dug out of a drawer and onto the few plates that aren’t broken. “I’m not promising a miracle breakfast here,” she says as she’s sliding the plates across the counter to Ellie and Lev. “But it’s food.”

Abby’s eyes land on Ellie as Lev takes a few heaping bites from his own plate. “You need to eat,” she tells her, like she’s talking to a child. “You didn’t eat yesterday.”

Did she not eat yesterday?

“I ate yesterday.”

“No, you didn’t,” Lev backs up Abby’s argument.

Ellie looks back at Abby, who is watching her intently, who doesn’t look like she’s going to look away until Ellie takes a bite of food. She cuts a piece of egg off with her fork and pops it into her mouth, the yolk and egg white mixing on her tongue, and that’s when she sees the name popping into her mind. _Lago Vista_ , where Lydia Miller née Tatum had written her letter.

“I know where Lago Vista is,” Ellie blurts out, and she’s pushing away from the table and moving for the foyer, moving to where she left her jacket last night. She pulls the envelope away, bringing it back to Abby and Lev and placing it down on the kitchen counter. “Lev, do you have your map?”

“ _Do I have my map_?” Lev repeats the ridiculous question, pulling it out from where his bag is dropped by the doors that lead to the back porch and spreading it out in front of him. He places the pad of his finger down on Austin’s name before trailing it over to where he’s circled _Bumelia Springs_. Ellie follows the path, looking for the bold town named _Lago Vista_ that’s slightly west of Austin.

“It’s not too far from here,” Ellie says, the electricity from yesterday suddenly charging through her veins all over again. She peers up at Lev, and a moment later, at Abby. “Do you want to go?”

“ _What_?” Abby asks incredulously. “No. We’re leaving for Galveston. We…” but Abby trails off, then. She doesn’t look at the pleading look in Lev’s eyes, her eyes stay fixed on Ellie, like she sees something that Ellie doesn’t see in herself. Like there’s a missing piece of a much larger puzzle. “What could possibly be in Lago Vista?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie says simply, honestly, because she doesn’t. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find out.”

Lev looks between Abby and Ellie, and a smile slowly breaks out across his lips when Abby’s gaze meets his. “What do you think?” he asks Abby, but judging from his voice, he already knows the answer.

After all, when it comes to Abby, Lev always wins.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥️ this has honestly gone so much further and beyond than where i could have possibly imagined it going, and i'm so excited for it. i'm about to start a replay of tlou/tlou2 and drown in all of my feelings. thank y'all so much for your support and for reading this!
> 
> playlist for this fic can be [found here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=sooFY_HNQ6qJMs4b_q7qdg) if you want the extra feelies - updated weekly ♥️
> 
> see you in the next chapter!


	7. in the middle of everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> abby's a mess but what else is new

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** this chapter includes slight transphobia (internalized, my baby lev) **
> 
> ** while the town in the last chapter may have been round rock, you will see that that town has now since been changed because of technicalities and me trying to learn about the apocalypse in real time !
> 
> thank u love u please enjoy **
> 
> **[fic playlist here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=Ef9rU087QLGX5sO757ZwEg)!**

* * *

* * *

_still, our hands match_

_still, with hearts beating_

* * *

* * *

Abby has spent the past few weeks imagining what it will be like when she gets to Galveston – imagining the moment when she comes face-to-face with the few remaining Fireflies that are out there, the ones that weren’t in Santa Barbara, but could really be in Texas. People who knew Marlene, who knew her father, who know and understand how it felt to have the Fireflies ripped away from them, to separate and scatter across the country in multiple directions like birds at the sound of a loud noise. The Rattlers from Santa Barbara kept her up at night, the naïve hope that had laced in her voice, the way that same, awful monster in her veins had told her and told her and told her that she should have listened to Lev when he didn’t trust the lead that she was following. 

But this lead was a lead that Lev had found all on his own, one that Lev had sought out and searched for and believed in. And he had done that for _her_. And they were going to be there. They were _so close_.

But instead of being miles closer to a Firefly sanctuary, she spent her morning waking up on the couch that had once belonged to a man she had killed. And now, instead of being closer to Galveston, she is traveling _west_ with Lev and still, for some reason, with Ellie. West. As in the way from which they came. As in the opposite direction from where they should be going.

Lev had been worried about Ellie this morning, had been sitting up and watching her sleep when Abby had stumbled out of the study and into the living room, bleary-eyed and jittery. There is no word that can be used to properly convey the emotions that charge through a person who is where they know they don’t belong, where they’re not supposed to be and never should be. This is the house where Joel raised his daughter, where Joel lived before the pandemic. This is not a place for Lev to be, for Abby to be.

It had been her idea to get eggs this morning, mostly as an excuse to get out of the house for a bit and try and find some food before they would be hitting the road again. She didn’t anticipate Lev striking up a conversation with the people in the brown house down the road. She didn’t expect them to mention Lago Vista, for it to sound so much like the Jackson community back in Wyoming that Abby had poured so much of her time and energy into tracking down, for Lev to be so invested in the possibility of a real community.

"Galveston will be one,” she had told Lev on the way back to Joel’s home, nearly a dozen eggs in a basket in tow. “It’ll be a community.” She had no idea if that was true, and she had no way of determining if it would be real at all – all she had was hope, was the faith and belief that if she looked for the light, it would be enough.

Lev hadn’t said anything, but when he’d looked up, Ellie had been standing on the front porch and she’d been waiting for them – she’d almost looked hopeful, almost looked like she could cry.

* * *

“Are you ever going to name your horse?” Lev is asking her, and Abby is brought back to the road ahead of her, the path the Lago Vista. Lev is looking at her with his eyebrows raised and a question poised at the corner of his mouth, but she knows as well as he does that he already knows the answer to his query.

“I don’t think I need to _name_ him,” she points out. “Artemis is already a better name than whatever I could come up with.”

“Artemis Junior it is,” Ellie notes from up ahead, eyes glancing over her shoulder for a brief moment. “You can call him A.J.”

“No,” Abby scoffs, and her gazes focuses back on Lev. “How much longer did you say it was to this place?”

“Not too far,” Lev is quickly eased back into his role as the navigator. “It was only a few hours’ ride to begin with. It’s only a little west of Austin.”

Joel didn’t live directly in Austin, but rather in a rural outskirt just past the city’s edge. Ellie had spent the first half of their night wandering around his house like a phantom, and Lev had sat as a statue waiting for her. Realistically, the voice that lived in her veins had already been telling her that there was no plausible way they would be able to just up and leave, even if she wanted to. Even if she needed to. She would have to take Lev away from the house kicking and screaming before he’d go anywhere without Ellie.

But this is the end of the line. Lago Vista is the end of the line. This is where the go their separate ways, the way that they already should have.

Up ahead, there is a soft note coming from Lev and Artemis, Lev whistling out a tune that he must have heard Abby humming many, many times before.

“Nice,” Ellie acknowledges, and even from behind the both of them, Abby can see her smiling at him. “Now listen to how I do it.”

Their whistles bounce off of one another, the same tune in two different octaves, and Abby can practically see the scene before her: her dad bustling around their shitty kitchen in Salt Lake City, frying eggs with a towel slung over his shoulder. Their house on the ranch isn’t much, but it’s become home. It _is_ home.

As he cooks up breakfast, she knows that he’s not thinking about everything that’s waiting for him outside their four walls. He’s not thinking about the animals or what’s going on at St. Mary’s. He’s not worried about Marlene and her desperate quest for a cure. He’s just worried about cooking breakfast and teaching Abby about every song he’s ever loved.

_Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there – with open arms and open eyes._

* * *

From up ahead, Abby can see the outline of Lago Vista forming from over the hills. There is a rusted-over metal water tower standing at the center of the town that reads _-OU-D RO-K_ , dozens upon dozens of laid out makeshift buildings surrounding it. Some of it look like they are repurposed old storefronts, and others almost look like newer builds. There are rows and rows of fields for greenery, a town square and barns and stables. From beside her, Ellie tenses on Kodak, knuckles growing white against his reins. 

“This is so cool,” Lev exhales, moving forward on Artemis and closer to the massive perimeter that surrounds the community. There are guards posted along the stone walls, barbed wire crawling up to the top of the ledges.

Abby turns back to look at Ellie. “How are we supposed to get in, exactly?”

“I have a way in,” she says with the same lick of confidence that she had with her earlier this morning when they were eating breakfast and she was asking them to come with her to this community on the outskirts of town. She trots ahead, pushing forward and closer to the parameter. Lev follows her a little too closely for Abby’s comfort, and she begrudgingly follows him, thinking about how many different ways this could go south and timing how quickly she’ll need to pull out her gun.

The guards are quickly at alert, hoisting their guns and holding their hands up to stop the trio from coming any closer, moving toward them. “Do you have business here?” one of them asks. He looks a couple years older than Abby, dreads pulled back with a band and dark eyes apprehensively shifting focus between all three of them. “Can’t let you in without—”

“—I have this,” Ellie cuts him off, reaching into the pocket of her jacket and pulling out the same wrinkled envelope she’d held in her hands this morning. “Just trying to follow an old lead,” a beat, “for an old friend.”

The guard looks at it for a moment and his eyes widen, calling over one of the other guards. They both look at it, and then back at Ellie. “How do you know Lydia?”

“I don’t,” Ellie says, and Abby and Lev share a look from behind her. “I know – knew – her ex-husband. Sarah’s dad.”

The men share another look before waving a signal to the other guard at the outpost. The doors grind open slowly and the first guard moves closer to Ellie to tell her something, pointing ahead and into the community.

Ellie turns back to look at Abby and Lev, nodding her head forward. “Let’s go.”

And for some reason, they follow her.

* * *

“So, Lydia was Sarah’s mom?” Lev asks after they’ve dropped their horses off at the stables. Lago Vista is a lot smaller than Abby imagines it once was, but everything is very organized and sectioned off. There is a section of markets to one side of the stables, small booths and restaurants to the other, and small developments of houses and complexes surrounding them. Ellie has hardly said more than a couple words since they got into town, looking down at the letter in her hand like it’s written in a foreign language she’s trying to decipher.

“Yeah,” she answers, glancing over at Lev. “I don’t know how they know her. If she’s even alive.”

“She seems alive,” Abby notes. “They wouldn’t have reacted like that if they didn’t know her.” It reminds her of the leads she followed that led her so close to Jackson, that sent her falling right into Joel and Tommy’s line of vision, that spiraled this entire domino effect piece by piece.

“Well, that’s why we’re here, right?” Lev clarifies, dodging a goat as it runs past them. He stops and turns, watching it run by with a flicker of awe in his eyes. He turns back to Ellie. “To find her?”

Ellie is shrinking into herself, arms crossing over her chest. “I don’t know,” she says. “This was stupid.”

Abby rolls her eyes, seeing a restaurant up ahead and nudging Lev’s shoulder. “Let’s grab food, yeah? Take a break.”

“ _You_?” Lev asks with amusement, peering back over at her. “You want to take a break?”

"Don’t get used to it,” she pipes back, marching forward and looking back over her shoulder at Ellie, who’s still glancing down at the paper between her fingers. “You coming?”

Ellie’s eyes lift, focusing back on Abby, and it dawns on Abby that she really shouldn’t care. Let Ellie go off on whatever quest it is that is so imperative to her right now – she and Lev can get food, find a place to crash for the night, and actually leave for Galveston in the morning. Properly. The way they need to.

“I could eat,” Ellie mutters, but her eyes are back on the envelope. “She’s probably here.”

“I bet she is,” Lev responds with a small smile. “I bet we’ll find her.”

Abby scuffs the toe of her boot along the dirt of the road, turning back to look at Ellie. “If nothing else,” she starts, words already feeling strange on her tongue, “it’s a lead. Right?”

If she didn’t know better, she’d almost think that Ellie had the shell of a smile as she looked back at her. “Yeah. Right.”

* * *

“What _is_ this?” Lev asks with wide eyes, staring at the plate in front of him. Beans, rice, corn tortillas, melted cheese, red sauce, and even more cheese. All staring right back at him.

“ _Those_ ,” Abby points out, taking a ravenous bite out of her sandwich, “are enchiladas.”

* * *

It’s their first real meal that they’ve had in they don’t know how long. A hot meal, plates of food until they’re so full they’re actually groaning when all is said and done. Everyone that walks past their table looks at them once, and then twice over. They’re newcomers, and it shows. This is clearly a town that doesn’t get many new faces, and now they have three of them sitting crammed together in a booth.

“Hey,” Lev greets one of the passersby who has been watching them from a table across the way. He reaches his hand out to Ellie and, as if on cue, she slides the envelope into his palm. When did they learn to speak with no words? Lev passes the envelope toward the couple at the table. “Do you know where we would find her? Lydia?”

“Lydia,” the lady lets out a gruff hum, looking at the man next to her and then back to the three of them. “Yeah. We know her. You can’t miss her.”

“She’s a handful,” the man replies with a laugh that gives him a sharp glare from the women beside him. “Should be here tonight. She works the bar.”

Abby’s gaze travels to the bar counter across the restaurant, where an old man is currently pouring a few glasses of beer. It causes a dull ache in her chest, the way that the world can go on spinning in some places while entirely seeming frozen in others. The people in this town have a life, have made something out of nothing – she can’t not take it all in.

“Tonight,” Ellie repeats slowly, taking the envelope back from him and sliding it into her pocket. The fingertips on her left-hand drum out a beat on the tabletop while the fingers on her right-hand curl into a nervous fist at her side. It’s a tick, Abby has begun to realize. She did it the day in the caves in Carlsbad, she did it yesterday when they were crossing the Austin city limits and again when they entered Joel’s house.

It reminds her of the way she’d always bounce her knee up and down when she couldn’t sit still, when Manny was late getting back from a patrol or Mel looked right at her before kissing Owen or her dad didn’t answer right away when she called him over the old walkie-talkies he used to make them carry around before they completely went to shit. “Just have to find a way to kill time until then,” Abby notes, looking between Lev and Ellie. “Yeah?”

Lev’s eyes brighten at this and he sits up a little higher in his seat. “Hear that, El? We’re sticking around.”

“Just until tonight,” Abby adds on, but Lev already has his eyes peeled toward the window in search of where to go next.

* * *

Everyone on the street glances at them like they’re shiny and new and definitely maybe dangerous, but there is one set of eyes that seems to follow them wherever they go. A girl, maybe Lev’s age, who wanders closely behind when they drift in and out of the markets but looks away as soon as Abby’s gaze meets hers.

"Do you see her?” she asks, and Ellie’s eyes on her as well. Lev is eyeing a basket of specially woven arrows in the corner, and the girl is moving closer. Not toward them, but toward him. She has brown skin, hair pulled back in small plaits, and dark eyes fixed specifically on the teenage boy in front of her.

She’s just a teenage girl, but so was Abby at one point. So was Ellie. And at this point, you have to be on alert of every new person you come into contact with – especially if the person they’re coming into contact with is _your_ person.

Lev’s gaze lifts and Abby instinctively has her hand moving to her hip just in case everything goes straight to hell and goes there fast. Ellie holds a hand up to pause her, eyes staying trained on Lev and the girl across from him.

“Hi,” she says, a little timid, but with a smile on your face. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“We’re just passing through,” Abby blurts out before Lev can get a word out.

Ellie’s eyes shoot warningly in her direction.

The girl offers her a small smile and a wave, but then she’s looking at Lev all over again. “My name is Hanna.”

“Lev,” he responds, giving her a short and fixed smile before he’s winding into the next aisle and moving toward a row of pillar candles in an assortment of colors on a table in the corner.

Hanna looks back at Abby and Ellie, and it’s Ellie who speaks first. “You’re from here?”

“Yeah, since I was born,” she offers a little sheepishly. “People sometimes stop here for a couple nights on their way south.”

“South like Galveston?”

“South like Mexico,” Hanna clarifies, but then she’s looking back in Lev’s direction. “He’s traveling with you?”

“Yeah,” Ellie notes. But he’s not really traveling with _them_ , because this is where the end of their journey with Ellie begins. He’s traveling with Abby. And she knows that Ellie is thinking the same thing from the way she wavers before replying. “The three of us. I’m Ellie,” she looks back over at Abby, “that’s Abby. Her face always looks like that.”

“What the _fuck_ does that mean?”

But Hanna is no longer listening to them. In fact, she’s wandering back toward Lev. Abby stands still for a few moments before she’s taking the aisle from the opposite direction and hovering a few feet away. Ellie hangs a little further back.

“There aren’t a lot of kids around here,” Hanna tells Lev. “I mean, I’ve had the same five friends since I was a baby.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Lev asks earnestly. “It sounds like a good thing.”

Hanna rolls back on the heels of her boots for a second. “I mean, yeah, it is. But it’s still cool to see a new face around.”

From behind her, Ellie is humming like she’s revealed a secret path that nobody else has yet discovered.

Lev finally looks back at her, and then he’s looking back at Abby and Ellie.

Abby clears her throat. “Well, we should probably get going,” she throws her lifeline, but Lev doesn’t move any closer to her. In fact, he’s looking back at Hanna. And then down at his shoes. And then back at Hanna.

“Oh,” Hanna says, defeat laced in her tone. “Well, we’re having a bonfire late tonight. Y’all will stick around for it, right?” It’s a question that’s directed at the group, but her attention is still on Lev. “You should come.”

Galveston. Galveston, Galveston, Galveston. The place she’s already supposed to be. The place she’s supposed to find home in, the place where Lev is supposed to find a safe haven. _Galveston_. “Actually—”

“—we’d love to,” Ellie interjects, speaking over Abby and sending sparks into her bloodstream. Her eyes dart in Ellie’s direction, but she’s smiling back over at Hanna, and moving closer to Lev. “Lev was just talking about how he wanted to hang out with more people his own age. Right, Lev?”

Lev’s lips are posed in a question, surely trying to rack his brain for a time in which he ever said that, but Ellie merely drops an arm around his shoulder. Abby wonders how many more times this is going to happen before this day is done, before this trip is over. How many times is Ellie going to stomp all over everything and take control of the situation? And why does Abby keep _letting_ her?

“Cool,” Hanna says with a bright smile – a bigger smile than Abby’s seen anyone hold in a long fucking time. It makes her wonder if Hanna has seen what goes on outside of the walls of this community, if she’s ventured out on patrols, watched an infected burst into a hundred bloody pieces right in front of her. “Do you want to meet out front of Mills Tavern around seven? We’ll kick off at eight, but it’ll give me time to introduce you to everyone.”

"You mean all five of your friends?”

“ _Lev_ ,” Abby catches herself scolding him.

But Hanna _laughs_. “You know what, Lev?” she asks him. “I think I like you. I think you’ll fit right in.”

* * *

“Why would you tell her that we would stick around for a fucking _bonfire_?” Abby is hissing to Ellie as they make their way back to the boarding house that they were put up in for the night. They hadn’t been into the makeshift inn since they dropped their stuff off when they first arrived, and now Ellie has declared that they should head back so that Lev could get ready.

So that he could get ready! As if the whole reason they were in this fucking mess in the first place wasn’t because of Ellie coming unhinged over the thought of facing Joel’s ex-wife.

AS IF ABBY SHOULD EVEN CARE!

“You were going to be here anyway,” Ellie argues, heading through the front door and up the old wooden staircase to the second floor. “Remember? You told Lev you would stay for tonight?”

" _Until_ tonight, not _for_ tonight.”

“It’s okay if you just want to leave,” Lev counters quickly – but it’s too quick of a response for Abby to be comforted by it. He had been smiling when Hanna had talked to him, and he had even been smiling when she had turned and left the market and shot one last smile at him from over her shoulder. But ever since they’d made it back out onto the street, Lev has been staring straight down at his feet, arms crossed over his chest as if he wants to make himself as small as possible, as if what had just happened no more than fifteen minutes ago hadn’t happened at all.

“Kid, you okay?” Abby finds herself asking. They’re at the door of the room and Ellie is shimmying the key into the lock, and it dawns on Abby all too quickly that the three of them are all going to be crammed into one room for the night. But it’s a room with beds, and that’s what matters. Right? Her attention goes back to Lev, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been sulking around since we left.”

“It’s nothing,” he says dismissively, turning the corner and disappearing into the bathroom. The door shuts behind him with a swift click of the lock.

Abby stares back at the closed door in shock, and she finds herself looking over at Ellie for any type of solace. “The fuck was that?”

Ellie shrugs, but she is moving to the chair in the corner and reaching for Joel’s guitar. She debated early this morning about whether or not she was going to take it, ultimately deciding against it, before Lev had zipped it into the bag that he’d dug out of the hall closet and was bringing it out to her on Kodak.

 _“What if something happened?”_ he’d asked her. _“What if it wasn’t here when you got back?”_

It had been all the incentive Ellie needed.

“He might be nervous,” she offers a beat later, absently plucking at strings before looking back up at Abby and meeting her gaze. It takes Abby aback for a moment, the fact that they’ve been able to actually talk today, the fact that it hasn’t all been short remarks and bitter retorts. “I mean, did they do shit like this back with the Seraphites? Did he have friends?”

“He had Yara,” Abby counters, but it dawns on her that Yara is the only “friend” he’s ever mentioned having. “And then he had me.” A beat. “And you, I guess.”

“So no,” Ellie declares. She places the guitar back down on the floor, leaning against the chair before she’s standing up and moving across the room to the bathroom, rapping on the door. “Lev, are you okay?”

“I don’t think I should go tonight,” his voice comes out soft from the other side of the door – small and mild and everything Lev is not.

“Why?” Abby finds herself asking. “What’s up?”

Lev reluctantly opens the door, but only a crack, peeking back at them. “Because, I don’t think her friends will like me.”

“Dude, _what_?” Ellie asks through a scoff. She’s pushing the door open the rest of the way, making her way into the small bathroom. It almost looks like it used to be a closet, like it was converted at some point after the pandemic. A small portable sink, a small portable toilet, a little wash basin with a hose for a shower. It’s still more than they’ve had most nights.

Lev is standing in front of the mirror, and his hands are no longer crossed over his chest, but rather pressed flat against it. His cheeks are wet with tears, and his gaze lifts to look at both Abby and Ellie from the mirror’s reflection as they enter the room. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” his voice crackles as he speaks. He looks down at himself, and then he looks back up at them. “I’m not. I don’t…”

“Lev,” Ellie breathes out, and Abby pushes forward to get closer to him. Ellie takes a step back, away from Abby, away from Lev, and further back into the room.

Her hands reach for Lev’s, pulling them from his chest and holding his palms between her own. “Kid, there is _nothing_ wrong with you. There is nothing about you that’s not exactly right.”

He sniffs, and his hands are releasing themselves from Abby’s grip, moving back to his chest. “Back in Carlsbad—”

“— _fuck_ those guys in Carlsbad. Fuck anyone who made you feel like there’s anything wrong with you.”

It brings her back to her conversation with Ellie, to the night after everything in New Mexico, to talking about how Lev was growing up, how he was fifteen and how that meant that there changes that were bound to happen to him and to his body. Changes that maybe Abby didn’t know how to handle on her own.

She’d always gotten shit growing up – she was bigger than most of the boys in her class, than the men in their squads. She had muscles that she was proud of, that she worked hard for, but she wasn’t built like _the other girls_ , so she wasn’t viewed like _the other girls_. And what the fuck did that even mean? What the fuck did it matter? When did someone’s outsides ever become so indicative of their insides?

And even with that, even with her own issues, she can never and will never feel what Lev feels when he sees himself, when he views himself. The very fear that has crept up on him all his life, the reasoning for why he left the Seraphite camp with his sister two years ago burrowed deep under his skin. He was growing, changing, and that didn’t mean that he liked everything that he saw.

“Hey,” Ellie says softly, returning into the bathroom with a roll of bandages. “There’s a character in those Savage Starlight comics I used to tell you about? He has bands around his chest – they kind of give him superpowers. But they also make him feel like he knows he’s supposed to feel.” She passes the roll to him. “Use these, if you want. But never decide you’re not gonna do something you want to do because you’re scared. Okay?” She waits a note before she’s giving him a small smile, fluffing a hand through his mop of yellow-blond hair, dark roots already beginning to peek through at the top. “I wish I was half as cool as you when I was fifteen. I was a fucking loser.”

“Yeah,” Abby adds on drily, and she’s blinking away tears before they sting her eyes any more than they already have. “Me too.”

Lev looks down at the roll and then back at them. “This will fix me?”

Abby swallows the lump in her throat, and she’s leaning forward a second later, planting a kiss square on his forehead. “There is _nothing_ to fix. This will just help you feel like you.” She steps back into the room and grabs a tee-shirt from her bag, tossing it to him. “It’ll be baggy.”

Ellie shrugs off the plaid shirt she’s been wearing since last night, one that she came downstairs with from Joel’s house that she hadn’t had when she’d gone upstairs. “And put this over it.”

When Lev steps out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it’s like the weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He grabs for his cowboy hat, the one that’s been sitting on the nightstand by the bed and places it over his head, turning back to Abby and Ellie. “Well?”

Abby smiles back at him, holding out her hand for a high five. “Badass.”

* * *

The sun is setting by the time they’re making their way out of the boarding house, back down the street and toward the tavern – the same tavern Hanna wants to meet Lev at is the same tavern where Ellie needs to be, and the two of them are seemingly nervous wrecks from either side of Abby. Ellie has the middle finger of her left hand in her mouth, gnawing at her fingernail, and Lev keeps checking over his shoulder like it’s still not too late to make a run for it.

But Hanna is already waiting for them outside the restaurant on the corner, swapping out the jacket and cargo pants she’d been wearing earlier for a yellow sundress and smiling brightly as Lev approaches. “You made it!” she chimes out. She moves to approach him before looking up at Abby and Ellie. “You two are more than welcome to come. The whole town’ll wind up there by the end of the night.”

Ellie appears skeptical, blinking back at her. “Who’s patrolling?”

“It rotates,” Hanna offers. “My dad is tonight, and a couple guys from his unit. It’s kinda the main reason I get to go tonight.”

“Because he doesn’t know,” Abby deadpans, and Ellie snorts from beside her.

Hanna looks down at her feet, before looking back at Lev. “You ready?”

Abby clears her throat. “We’ll come, too,” she says quickly. Ellie is looking back at the tavern and Abby shakes her head. “I will, at least.”

Ellie looks away from the tavern and back at Hanna and Lev. “Uh, yeah. Me, too.” She walks ahead, away from the tavern, as if she hadn’t wanted to stop there at all.

* * *

“You know the whole reason we’re still _here_ is so you can go to that fucking bar, right?” Abby asks quietly as they cut through a field toward the outskirts of town. From up ahead, she can see the smoke billowing up in clouds, a large fire in the middle with logs and tree stumps scattered around. There are guys playing guitar and harmonicas, makeshift drums and thumb pianos.

“I’ll _go_ ,” Ellie counters. “You don’t want Lev here by himself, do you?”

“Oh, because I can’t watch Lev by myself?”

“Shut up.”

“You first.”

Ellie rolls her eyes, moving toward a table in the corner where there are drinks set up – all homemade concoctions of moonshine and whatever mixed drinks they could come up with. “He’ll be fine,” she advises, and she’s nodding her head to where Hanna is leading Lev through the crowd and toward a group of people his own age that are sitting on a blanket in the grass.

“The _fuck_ is this place?”

“It’s life,” Ellie comments wryly. “Some people still have one.”

Ellie grabs a drink from the table, and Abby’s eyes dart around to find Lev and keep her gaze following carefully on his movements. He’s sitting beside Hanna and her friends, smiling politely. He’s not crossing his arms over his chest; he’s actually _talking_ to them.

She notices that Ellie has come to stand next to her, and she lets out a slow breath. She doesn’t know how this happened. How she’s wound up here, in this place, with this specific person. She doesn’t know why the world doesn’t feel like it’s going to blow up on her at any given second because of it. She doesn’t know much of anything.

“I grew up in a quarantine zone,” Ellie observes quietly, after a moment or two of Lev-watching. “For my whole life. I just kinda bounced around from one to the other. Never really knew my parents – my mom, though? She knew Marlene. They were friends.”

The name _Anna_ rings through Abby’s head like a ambiguous and hollow echo, and she doesn’t know from where it’s stemmed.

Ellie takes a long sip of her drink, and Abby notes the way her entire face scrunches up at the alcohol. “I never really knew…anything besides QZs until—” her voice stills for a moment “—Joel, and uh. Marlene, and everything. Because it was his job to take me and…” she shakes her head, and she downs her glass until it’s empty. “Anyway. I was so fucking happy to just be outside. It was pouring rain, fucking freezing. And all I cared about was that I was outside in it.” She stares down at her shoes. Abby’s gaze swiftly averts when she catches herself noticing the way Ellie’s teeth dig into the split in her bottom lip. 

Her vision moves back to Lev – he’s laughing at something Hanna has said, hands moving wildly in front of her as she tells a story. For a second, she can almost see this as his alternate reality – being a teenager with a life, with friends, without the world hanging over his head and always having to keep his bow strapped across his back _just in case_. “That sucks,” she adds on after a second. “Really.”

Ellie looks down at her empty cup wistfully, peering over her shoulder at the makeshift bar before back ahead at Lev and Hanna. “All I’m saying is… even if he didn’t grow up in a QZ, he still grew up somewhere where he didn’t get to have anything. I think it’ll be good for him to feel like he gets to have _something_. You know?”

“Yeah,” Abby breathes out slowly, fingertips trembling and making her wish she had something to hold onto. “I guess I do.”

* * *

It’s late, the sky an inky black and the stars winking back at them from behind the clouds, when Lev approaches them, eyes shining and a dazed smile on his face. Abby and Ellie have shifted from standing awkwardly near the bar to sitting just as awkwardly on opposite sides of a wooden table, Ellie watching every guitar player around them and Abby keeping her gaze like a hawk on Lev.

“I’m glad I came,” he tells them, and he’s sending a wave to Hanna from over his shoulder as Abby and Ellie stand to make the trek with him back into town.

“Yeah?” Abby asks, smiling despite herself and bumping her shoulder to his.

Ellie glances around them to where Hanna is disappearing into the crowd before looking back over at Lev. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she has a _crush_ on our Lev.”

 _Our Lev_ pierces Abby straight through the gut.

" _What_?” Lev asks, as if this is the wildest thing he’s ever heard. “No. She was just being _nice_.”

Abby scoffs. “People aren’t just _nice_ , Lev,” she tells him. “Nobody is.” A beat passes, and then she’s sending a warning look back to Ellie. “Maybe we shouldn’t trust her. People _aren’t just nice_.” From between the two of them, Lev groans.

The Lago Vista crowd is weaving and winding through the fields on their way back toward the main roads into town, but when Abby hears a girl’s voice calling out to Lev, she quickly stops and puts a hand to Lev’s shoulder to stop him in the process.

She turns, seeing Hanna making her way back through the crowd and toward him. “I just wanted to say that I’m glad you came tonight,” she says, a little breathless. She looks up at Abby and Ellie like an afterthought. “All of you!”

“Do you want to walk back with us?” Lev asks her, and Abby’s eyes widen, turning back to look at him. _Does she want to what?_

Hanna’s nodding and Lev is falling behind Abby and Ellie just enough that he can fall into step with her. Abby’s jaw drops, turning back to look at them, but the two of them are already lost in another conversation with one another.

Ellie smirks, watching the two of them for a moment, before she’s looking up ahead, seeing the soft lights of Lago Vista peeking back ahead of them. Her body goes rigid for a moment beside Abby and she lets out a shaky breath.

“Still need to stop by the tavern,” Abby points out.

“I think we’re fine.”

“That’s _why we’re here_.”

From behind them, Hanna is asking Lev when he’s leaving in the morning. She’s asking if he can stay a little longer. Because this is all almost over, because this is just another passing ship in a sea of passing ships and Galveston is still waiting for them, waiting for her, and she’ll be damned if she’s let down again.

* * *

They’re approaching the tavern and Ellie is looking up at it like it’s a beast at the top of a tall tower. She looks back at Abby and Lev as they near the entryway, halting at the front step and turning back to them. “I’ll take it from here,” she says, but her voice is coated in uneasiness. She turns without another word – without giving them a chance to get in another word – and makes her way inside the bar, the door swinging shut behind her.

Lev watches her for a moment before he’s turning back to Abby. “We should probably go in, right?” he asks. “Just in case.”

Abby wants to say no. She wants to tell him that they’ve done more than enough, that they’ve stuck themselves in far enough places where they don’t belong. She wants to tell him that they need to get back to the room, try and get some sleep before they hit the road in the morning and make the trek to Galveston.

Instead, she’s moving into the tavern with Lev at her heels, and she’s blaming it all on the name of morbid curiosity.

The two of them take a booth in the corner, watching as Ellie approaches the woman at the bar. She has blonde hair, pulled into a bun at the top of her head, and tattoos winding along her arms. She looks up when Ellie approaches, and Abby can’t hear what she’s saying. All she knows is the effect it must have on Lydia, judging by the way her face falls before turning to a painful smile. She’s saying something to the man who works in the kitchen and moving around the bar, moving closer to Ellie. She has her hands on either of her shoulders, giving her a long look. And then she’s hugging her – and she’s hugging her tight.

Ellie looks up from Lydia’s shoulder, sees Abby and Lev’s eyes on them, and gestures to Lydia to follow her, making their way toward the two of them.

“Is this who you’re traveling with?” Lydia asks, wiping a tear from her eye. “Did you two know Joel?”

Abby shifts uncomfortably in her seat, standing up nearly as swiftly as Lydia arrives. “You should talk,” she says, acid burning the back of her throat. “I need to get some sleep.”

Lev watches her in worry, eyes flickering between Abby and Ellie and Lydia. “Yeah,” he’s quick to echo Abby’s words. “We have a busy day in the morning.” He’s shooting up from the table quickly, finally following Abby’s lead, and letting her lead the both of them straight out of the restaurant.

* * *

She doesn’t stop walking. She’s probably walking fucking laps in the goddamn town square at this point, and Lev keeps up with her. “Abby,” he calls out to her. “ _Abby_.”

“What the _fuck_ are we doing here?” she finally spins around to face him, spitting the words out with tears burning her cheeks. “What the fuck is this, Lev? This wasn’t the plan. This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing. What the _fuck_ are we doing here?” Her breath is coming out labored, uneven and rattling in her lungs. “I slept in _Joel Miller’s_ house last night, Lev. I _killed_ him. He _killed my father_. And I’m fucking _backpacking_ with his kid?”

“She’s not—”

“—you _know what I mean_ , Lev,” Abby is begging him not to attempt to placate her. Her fingers are tugging at her short strands of hair, and she finally comes to a stop against an old utility post. “I mean, I can’t fucking do this. We can’t fucking do this. It’s not _normal_.”

“What the fuck even _is_ normal, Abby?” Lev fires back at her, holding his arms out in surrender. “Does any of this look normal? There _is_ no normal. There isn’t just good and bad. There isn’t just dark and light. There is so much shit in the middle of all of it. And that’s where we are. We are in the middle of everything.” Lev wipes at his cheek with the back of his hand, and it occurs to Abby that she isn’t the only one crying. “You have to get over this.”

“I can’t just—”

“—yes, you _can_ ,” he argues. “You know what I did back in Seattle. What…. What happened to me. With my mom. With my camp. With _everything_. And I got up, and I kept going, and I didn’t want to forgive myself, but I did. You helped me do that. _You_ and Yara and…” his voice cracks at the name. “You helped me forgive myself.” He rocks back on his heels, looking back at her like he’s seeing her for the very first time. “But when are you going to forgive _yourself_?”

For the first time in a long time, Abby feels small. She feels like she’s shrinking into herself, like her heartbeat is growing wilder and wilder with each ticking second. “I don’t _regret it_ , if that’s what you mean.”

"I know you don’t.”

But sometimes – sometimes – the voice that keeps her up at night isn’t Joel’s or Tommy’s from that cabin. Sometimes, it’s someone else. Sometimes it’s a girl, crying and spitting and screaming _“Joel, fucking get up,”_ and _“I’ll fucking kill you.”_ Sometimes, it’s the sound of a girl getting her father ripped away from her the same way Abby had hers stolen from her – and when that voice shows up, that’s when the regret comes. Quickly followed by anger, by waves of hurt and agony and confusion and guilt and fury over every single action that followed. How it all could have been prevented. How maybe _she_ is the one with Owen and Mel’s blood on her hands, and not Ellie. And she can’t escape that. She can’t escape herself, no matter how hard she tries.

“Fuck,” she groans, and she’s covering her face with her hands. It doesn’t matter how humiliating this is, how much these past few days have drained her, how on edge she’s felt since they got into Texas – nothing takes away the sheer fact that this is _humiliating_. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Okay,” Lev says it like he means it, but deep down, they both know it’s not true.

* * *

When Ellie slips into the room, Lev is already asleep in one of the beds, and Abby is reading a book that she swiped from Save-Its on the floor, leaning against the other footboard. It’s some terrible mass-market paperback crime story, the kind her dad used to find in odd places and call “drug store novels” before adding them to his personal library just to have more books around. Her head lifts when she sees Ellie, and Ellie is looking back at her, before looking over at Lev.

“Hey,” Ellie greets her coolly, and her voice sounds more like it has in days’ past.

"Hey,” Abby responds, but her focus shifts back down to the book in her hands.

Ellie moves over to the chair in the corner, taking a seat and picking up Joel’s guitar. She doesn’t make any sort of motion to play it, just holds it in place, right up against her. “I wasn’t going to tell her, you know.”

“Didn’t seem like somewhere I needed to be,” Abby is stiff in her reply, turning the page without even reading the one before it.

“You’re the one that followed me in.”

“Because of Lev.”

“Cut the shit, Abby.”

The lines on the page blur into gray and black squares and shapes, until Abby has no choice but to close the book and sit it on the floor in front of her. She doesn’t have an answer – doesn’t know if there really is an answer, if there is any sort of explanation for this newfound partnership or understanding or whatever-the-fuck it is that they have been able to establish between one another. It’s not friendship, it’s not respect, it doesn’t even feel like mutual cohabitation or existence. But they are two supposedly parallel lines that are intersecting when they shouldn’t be, and Abby doesn’t know what that means, either.

She swallows hard. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Lydia asked if we wanted to go on patrol with her and a couple guys from her unit. See the area.”

“Why the fuck would we want to see the area?” Abby turns to face her, and Ellie is merely looking back at her, the slit in her eyebrow cocked as if raising a question. Abby turns away from her, looking back down at the book that she’ll probably never finish. “You can do whatever you want. We won’t be here.”

“Yeah,” Ellie scoffs. “We’ll see.”

She moves for the other bed across from Lev’s, crawling in without another word, and flipping off the oil lamp without so much as a heads’ up; leaving Abby in the dark, right where she belongs.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ these were my final lyrics to still to use as an epigraph!! 
> 
> i have to find a new song now! 
> 
> i didn't expect this fic to go this far! 
> 
> i'm in shock daily! 
> 
> but i'm also so happy!
> 
> if y'all ever want to yell at me about tlou feelings/general feels, you can follow me on tumblr [here](http://summerskin.tumblr.com) and twitter [here](http://twitter.com/soulmeetsbody) (asks and dms are always open)
> 
> see you in the next update - thank you again and again and again for all ur kind words ❤


	8. you know that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a lot of emotions all happening at once, my guy. a whole lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (no beta read we die like men) 
> 
> (BLOOD TW AHEAD)
> 
> ❤ but for real, thank y'all so much for your interest in this fic it means so much to me! 
> 
> please enjoy this update ❤
> 
> (( [have some playlist feels while you read](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=WjmpUSTfRB2us-djCGTDFQ) ))

* * *

* * *

_despite everything, i'm still human_

_but i think i'm dying here_

* * *

* * *

"Did you ever try to find him?”

It was one of the first questions Ellie asked last night, as she sat across the bar table from Lydia Tatum, who was once Lydia Miller. Who was Joel’s wife, who was Sarah’s mother, who was a ghost from a past of which Ellie had never really been a part.

“No,” Lydia replied, and she said it with such a simple finality that it nearly made Ellie do a double-take. She gave Ellie a timid smile before continuing. “I knew that Sarah—” her voice caught on the name, and she fiddled with a tarnished locket hanging around her neck on a thin chain, “—I knew we’d lost Sarah. But I also knew that I wasn’t going to leave Texas. I…” a flush spread across her cheeks. “When the outbreak started, I hardly left my house for the first two years. It was pathetic. I was miserable, and I was angry at the world. I wanted to be with my baby.” Ellie’s gaze dropped to her lap as she continued. “And Joel would never want to stay in one place like that, not without Sarah tying him there.” She blinked away tears and looked back at Ellie, reaching across the table for her hands. “He was a good man. But I’m sure you know that.”

“Yeah,” Ellie had a hard time finding her voice, words heavy on her tongue. “The best.” The drink Lydia had poured for her sat untouched in front of her, gaze staying fixed on Lydia. “How…how did you find out? About what happened to him?”

“Tommy made sure I knew,” Lydia replied. “Word gets around when you need it to.” She took a sip of her own drink, clearing her throat and smiling gingerly at Ellie. “How is Tommy doing?”

Ellie’s mind flickered to the final looks Tommy had shot her when she’d last been in Jackson, to how disappointed he’d been in her for not wanting to go to Santa Barbara and finish the job. She can hear the gunshot against his temple, she can smell the musty, stale air of the theater when she closes her eyes. He was so _angry_ at her and she had to remind herself over and over and over again that Joel would hate him for talking to her the way that he did. Tommy could go fuck himself. She’d lost Joel, too. He didn’t get to take that loss away from her.

"He and his wife split up,” was all Ellie could find to respond with. “But, he’s Tommy. He bounces back.”

The look that Lydia gave her in response had been wary, maybe even a little disbelieving. “The two of us never really got along,” she admitted after another moment or two. “But I’m glad that Joel had him,” she paused for a second, the wary look easing into a small smile. “And you. From what I’ve heard, you were pretty damn special to him.”

Ellie swallowed hard, sitting back slightly against the worn-in booth in her discomfort. She didn’t understand how the world – the world that should have been so, so big – could still wind up being so fucking tiny at the same time. 

“A bunch of us are going out on patrol in the morning,” Lydia changed the subject with a small cough and a sip of her drink, determined gaze on Ellie. “You and your friends should come along. See what it’s like out here.” Her look was hopeful, a silent and unspoken plea beyond her focus. “Might see that it wouldn’t be so bad to stick around.”

For a brief moment, Ellie had tried to imagine what it would be like to pitch the idea to Abby – Abby, who practically had both feet out the door, who had bolted out of the bar that second that Lydia had approached them. Why had she and Lev even followed her inside the tavern in the first place?

She merely offered a small, albeit skeptical, smile back to Lydia, hoping that it passed for thoughtful, maybe even hopeful. “I’ll talk to them when I get back to the room,” she told her. “About going on patrol, at least. They’re not going to stick around beyond that.”

“Shame,” Lydia hummed, and it sounded like she meant it. “I think they’d like it here. You all would.”

Ellie didn’t have the heart to tell Lydia that she wasn’t sticking around, either. That she would finish up here and go back to Austin, get her shit sorted, figure out her next steps. She didn’t know if she would find her way back to Jackson yet – or anytime soon, or _ever_ – but she knew that she had a lot to work through. She had a whole new Ellie to learn about.

“Yeah,” was what she said instead. “We probably would.”

* * *

Abby is already awake and out the door by the time Ellie is rolling over and stirring, the sunlight just beginning to peak through the sheer curtains over the window. She sits up quickly at the realization, abruptly brought back to yesterday morning, to feeling isolated in Joel’s home, to trying to figure out her next steps on her own. 

But… Lev is sitting up against the headboard of the bed next to hers, and Joel’s guitar is propped on his lap. His eyes widen when he sees Ellie watching him, putting the guitar back down on the floor and offering her a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Ellie counters. She leans across the bed and over the space between their beds, picking the guitar up and handing it back to Lev. “Somebody should play it.”

He holds the neck delicately against his palm, looking back at Ellie with a timid gaze. “I don’t really know how.”

“I’ll teach you.” Her answer is quick, confident, like there’s no doubt in her mind that she can – and will – teach him how to play. Like nothing will prevent her from making that happen.

“Cool,” Lev says with a small nod. “Cool.”

By the time she’s getting around in the restroom, the sound of the bedroom’s door is opening and Abby’s voice is in her ears in the form of a greeting to Lev. “You ready?” she hears Abby ask from behind the door, and the traitorous knife in Ellie’s gut twists ever so subtly.

Lev doesn’t answer her.

There’s a rap at the door and Ellie doesn’t know how it can possibly make her jump, but it does. She grips onto the edge of the sink for a moment, closing her eyes and urging herself to grow the fuck up, before she opens the door a crack and sees Abby Anderson looking back at her – decisive, meditative, and not at all happy to be standing where she is. Her arms cross and uncross from her chest, blinking at Ellie expectantly. “Well?”

"Well what?”

“Aren’t we going patrolling or whatever?”

Lev’s mop of blond hair peers around Abby from where he sits on the bed, eyes fixed on Ellie and a smile across his lips. “Yeah, Elle,” he echoes Abby. “Aren’t we going patrolling or whatever?”

Last night, Abby had told her in nothing but an absolutely certain and dead-set tone that she and Lev would be leaving at first light. They weren’t going to go patrolling, they weren’t going to humor whatever charade was going on in Lago Vista. They were heading for Galveston. So why – _for what reason_ – would Abby have changed her mind like that?

“What happened to Galveston?” Ellie asks pointedly.

Abby is pensive, tapping her foot impatiently across from her. “Look, are we going or not?”

Ellie holds her hands up in surrender, taking a step back across the cracked, tile floor of the bathroom. “Yeah,” she says. “We’re going.”

* * *

They meet up with Lydia near one of the outposts by the stables. She is feeding her horse, looking up when she sees Ellie and Abby and Lev approaching. A smile lifts. “You made it.”

“Lev!” another voice pipes up, and Ellie sees Hanna poking her head out from inside the stables, setting the brush she was using down on a wooden table and making her way toward them. “You’re coming today!”

Lev, Ellie has learned, while many amazing things, is not capable of playing it cool. A flush quickly spreads across his cheeks and he nods back at her. “Yeah. I mean, what if you can’t shoot a bow and arrow and it’s you versus a horde of demons?”

"Demons?” her face scrunches up, head tilted to the side in question.

“Infected,” Abby and Ellie answer in unison, and Abby’s gaze drops to her boots.

“Oh,” Hanna nods, moving closer to Lev. “I like that. It fits them.”

Lev’s blush deepens and he clears his throat, staring ahead and into the stables. “Have you met Artemis?” he asks her. “She’s my horse.”

"If that’s an offer, then I’d love to meet her,” Hanna’s smile is infectious, and Lev is quickly returning the gesture. He guides her back into the stables and Abby watches them, mystified and dumbfounded.

Ellie keeps her eyes on them for a moment before looking back at Lydia. “What’s the protocol?”

“We normally split into groups of two or three and have designated patrol areas. I figure you two can come with me,” she gestures to Abby and Ellie, “and Hanna and Lev can take it easy on some of the paths closest to here – they’re maintenance routes more than anything else. Just to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be, traps are still in shape – that sort of thing.”

Abby tenses from beside Ellie. “I should probably go with him,” she counters.

Ellie knows, even if Abby will never admit it aloud, that the sight of Lev held against the cold wall of a cave back in New Mexico still haunts her at night. She’s hardly let Lev out of her sight since that day, and she doesn’t imagine that’s going to change any time soon. Her gaze travels to the stables, to where Hanna is holding her palm open in front of Artemis’ mouth and leaning up on her tiptoes so that she can scratch behind the horse’s ear with her free hand. Lev is watching her in awe, and Ellie is suddenly back at the quarantine zone, back in the halls of her military school. She is angry at the world, confused about everything, and the only person that can provide her with even a little bit of solace, was the girl who saved her from bullies, who took her under her wing and never let her too far out of sight. Riley was her person, and in a world that could feel so isolating all the time, that was really all that started to matter.

Lev could have that with Hanna. Someone his own age, someone to confide in. It had been electrifying to watch him last night, how terrified he’d been to go to the bonfire and how _happy_ he’d been by the time they were leaving for the night.

“I think he’ll be okay,” she tells Abby, glancing back at her. “I think this will be good for him.”

Abby opens her mouth to interject, but Ellie cuts her off.

“You know he can take care of himself.”

Abby looks like she’d rather eat her hand than admit it.

“Nothing ever happens on the maintenance routes,” Lydia assures the two of them. “And Hanna can more than hold her own. Her father helped build this place from the ground up with _his_ father – she’s damn near been shooting a gun since she could read.”

Abby watches Lev and Hanna begrudgingly, but she’s sighing a second later. “Yeah,” she says, tone defeated. “I guess.”

Lev looks back over at them after a moment or two, in that way that you always do when you just know in your gut that you’re being talked about, and gives them a small smile with a wave of his hand. “It’ll be good for him,” Ellie says, but she doesn’t know if she’s trying to convince herself of this or Abby.

Abby’s response is a quick motion of hiking her bag up her shoulder and making her way into the stables. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

* * *

The outer areas of Lago Vista are green and expansive, the Colorado River stretching out on every side of them. Lev and Hanna were sent to scan the perimeter of the town, closest to where they had left earlier this morning, while Lydia was guiding Abby and Ellie up into the bluffs further out of town. 

“When was the last time you had a problem with infected around here?” Ellie asks, Kodak trotting alongside Lydia and her horse, keeping pace with her.

“We don’t have too many run-ins,” Lydia points out. “They normally come from the other way, closer to the city,” she jerks her thumb vaguely behind her, as if they can all see Austin from where they are. “Couple runners here and there, maybe a clicker or two in some of the lake houses. It’s pretty quiet, overall.”

“Quiet sounds nice,” Ellie hums and Abby scoffs from behind her.

Lydia gives her a smile like it’s a secret, reaching over just long enough to place a hand on Ellie’s shoulder before she’s pulling it away and looking off ahead. “I’m gonna head on up,” she tells her after a moment or two, “check on the watchtowers. You two hang around here, take the east side, all right?”

Before Ellie can respond, Lydia is galloping ahead, a woman on a mission, and Ellie hangs back for a second to look at Abby. “East side?”

Abby’s response is a dry hum of acknowledgement, heading toward the bend of the river until Ellie has no choice but to follow her.

“What made you come?” she asks, and inside, she is cursing herself for her curiosity. Because it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t care, because Abby should have just _left_.

Abby clears her throat, not responding right away. One of her hands is on the reins of her horse, and the other is resting idly against the base of her shotgun. “Yesterday,” she says after a moment or two, resigned at best. “When you were talking about… the QZ and everything.” Her gaze turns, looking over her shoulder in the direction that Lev and Hanna wandered off in earlier. “I don’t want him to feel that way.”

If things were different – if this was a different time, in a different place – Ellie might have been smug. Might have looked at Abby with a quirked brow and a smirk and teased her: _“Oh, so now you’re taking my advice?”_

But this isn’t a different time, this isn’t a different place, and they are still the same two people that they were when they woke up this morning. So, instead, Ellie just clears her throat and nods. “He’ll appreciate it,” she says, tone stiff.

Abby keeps her eyes locked back toward the large fences that surround the entirety of the Lago Vista community – she looks like if she focuses _just enough_ , she’ll actually see Lev and Hanna show up.

Ellie nudges Kodak forward, bracing him to jump over an askew log and almost just as quickly tugging on his reins to stop him from going any further. She hears them before she sees them, as it always is when it comes to runners, and she is quick at hopping off of Kodak and grabbing her gun. “Up ahead,” she says over her shoulder, hearing the rustle of Abby’s bag and weapons from behind her as she hits the ground.

The runners are screaming like banshees and they’re running straight at them. Ellie quickly lunges for one, grabbing it around the neck and driving her blade into the side as Abby knocks another down to the dirt with the butt of her rifle. She stomps on his face without a second thought, without flinching, and Ellie can see the blood and gore exploding from the corner of her eye.

She doesn’t have much more time to react than that, diving forward with her rifle pointed ahead, bullet tunneling straight for another runner’s temple and sending him flying into the river. Abby takes down another with a swing of her baseball bat, effortless and angry.

“I think that’s all of them,” Abby breathes out a few moments later, looking around their surroundings to see if anything else is gearing up to pop out at them. “Where did they come from?”

“That way, I think,” Ellie gestures over to a rock formation up ahead, an old abandoned campground and a busted-open camper. “Probably more where they came from.”

“Yeah,” Abby’s breath is staggered, and she’s hopping back up on her horse. She clicks her tongue and they are running forward, past Ellie and up ahead toward the campsite. Abby, for as hesitant and paranoid she may come across a lot of the time, tends to burst into things headfirst – actions now and consequences later.

Ellie, begrudgingly, has no choice but to follow after her.

* * *

The sun is starting to set over the hills as they head back up to Lago Vista from the third infected campsite they’d stumbled onto. None of them were swarming with infected, necessarily, most just being a few straggling runners and stalkers, but it was enough to have Ellie wishing for a shower, a bath, anything to get the dirt and earth and blood off of her for the night.

“We’re supposed to meet back at the stables, turn in patrol logs,” Ellie points out.

“Typically how patrols go, yeah,” Abby is dry with her response, and Ellie is momentarily taken aback. When did this role reversal happen? Why is it that Ellie is trying to be communicative and Abby is being cold and closed off?

She decides she’s not going to dwell on it, brushing past Abby on Kodak and making the rest of the journey in a shared silence. If Abby wants to be difficult, Ellie can be difficult right back – she wrote the handbook on being difficult, and she was absolutely entitled to behaving that way.

Lydia and the others are already waiting for them at the stables when they arrive back into town, Lydia’s face lighting up when she spots Ellie rounding the corner. “How’d it go?”

“Cleared out some campsites, left notes at the outpost a few miles back.” She reaches behind her for her bag, pulling out the notebooks that Lydia had sent with her this morning. “Rest is in there.”

Lydia takes the notebook from her, smiling back at Ellie gingerly, warmly. It’s hard to believe that this is someone that she shares so much history with, even if neither of them fully realize it, even if they were never in each other’s lives until right this second. “Nicely done, ladies.”

Abby merely harrumphs in response, but a second later, her tone is changing. Ellie can’t see her, but it’s like she can feel her tensing up just the same. The same way that Ellie is, the knot twisting in her gut growing tighter, and tighter.

“Where’s Lev?” Abby asks, and she is skipping past curious and going straight to concerned. “He didn’t come back?”

Lydia glances over her shoulder, looking back at the two of them worriedly. “I guess we haven’t seen him.”

“You _guess_?” Abby spits back at her. “You _guess_ you haven’t seen—”

“—Abby—”

Abby is silencing Ellie the moment she’s opening her mouth. “ _No_ ,” she fires back at her. “No, I fucking _told you_ I didn’t want him going off on his own.”

“Abby, I’m sure he’s fine,” Lydia assures her, and Ellie wishes that she could grab her by her shoulders and tell her that that’s not going to help anything. “He’s got Hanna with him and—”

“—the fuck do I care who’s with him?” Abby spouts back. “Where _is_ he?”

Ellie is already coaxing Kodak backwards, quickly spinning back toward the main gates of town. “We’ll find him,” she tells Abby, not bothering to meet her gaze. “Let’s go.”

Abby is kicking off ahead of her, bolting out the gates and into the setting sun. “You take the east, I’ll take the west,” she calls out over her shoulder.

Ellie remembers being sixteen and being so confident that she could handle the trails in Jackson by herself. It had been before her first solo hunt, and she had taken off on her own. Hadn’t told Joel, or Dina, or Kat, or Jesse, or Tommy, or anyone that she was leaving. She’d just gone. She’d remembered Joel’s words, the words he _always gave her_ , about making sure she was home before dark. But she’d gotten lost, her and Shimmer being completely turned around when a horde of infected had been approaching her. It had been Jesse that showed up, guns blazing and ripping the infected away from her.

_“Are you fucking crazy?”_ he’d all but screamed at her. _“You know the fucking rules.”_

_“I can take care of myself,”_ Ellie had shot back – defiant, angry, _embarrassed_. She’d raced past him on Shimmer, heart aching from pounding so hard between her lungs. She didn’t know what time it was, she could hear Joel scolding her already, telling her that she had to take better care of herself, that he didn’t give a shit if she was immune because she could still die just like everybody else. _“You still bleed,”_ he would tell her, _“and that means you have to take care of yourself.”_

She doesn’t know this area, Abby doesn’t know this area, and neither does Lev. Even if Hanna can navigate them, they are both kids. No matter how fast this world forces children to grow up, they are still children at their core. Teenagers. And teenagers fuck up all the goddamn time. Ellie knows that better than most.

Abby is right to be upset with her – this wouldn’t have happened if Abby had been with him, because Abby would have charted every single place they’d gone so that she could map their way back. Didn’t Lev _have_ his map? How could Lev get lost?

“Fuck,” Ellie mutters under her breath, she and Kodak heading up another hill and through a grove of trees.

And that’s when she hears it – soft, but unmistakable. “ _Hello_?”

Lev.

_This is not going to be like Carlsbad, this is not going to be like Carlsbad, this is not going to be like Carlsbad_ – it is a mantra in Ellie’s mind, internal pleas mixed with the blame, blame, blame of letting Lev go off on his own. Even if he was sure he could handle it, even if he _could_ handle it, he had no business going solo right now.

“Lev?” she calls out, stilling Kodak near the front of the woods and hopping off, making her way through the brush and the trees. “Lev, where are you?”

“Here,” his voice is quiet, but not frantic. Scared, but strong.

She flashes her flashlight into the trees to signify where she is, following the path as he flashes his own, letting the light get closer, and closer, and closer – until she finds him.

He is leaning against a tree, bow across his lap, and worried gaze meeting Ellie’s relieved one. She drops to the ground beside him. “What’s up, what are you doing?”

“Hanna,” her name rolls off his tongue heavily.

She furrows her brows back at him, leaning back and glancing to either side of them. A million and one scenarios fly through her mind at once – the one where she has to explain to Hanna’s father that they inadvertently got his daughter somehow killed coming in at the very top before she brings herself back to the here and now. “Where is she?”

He points to the figure slumped against a rock a few feet away, hand curled around her leg and panicked eyes meeting Ellie’s. “I can’t go home,” she whimpers, voice filled with tears. “I can’t go home.”

“What?” Ellie asks, but her gaze is quickly moving to Hanna’s hand on her leg, where she refuses to move it away from her ankle. For a brief moment, she is back in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and a newly infected Sam is launching himself at her from an abandoned kitchen. No. _No_. “Hanna?”

Hanna merely shakes her head. “W-we… there were so many…”

“Infected,” Lev says through a shudder, and it is the very first time that Ellie has ever heard him refer to them as such. “Clickers and runners and they were _everywhere_. I kept fighting them off and fighting them off and H-Hanna…”

“I’m out of bullets,” Hanna seethes out. “And I can’t go home.”

Ellie notices then that there is something shining in the hand resting against Hanna’s ankle – a blade. Fuck. _Fuck_.

She swallows hard, moving closer to Hanna and staying crouched beside her. “When did it happen?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” is Hanna’s response, a throaty yelp. “It wasn’t d-dark yet.” She shakes her head aggressively, shuddering and pushing herself further back against the tree; like she’s waiting for it to split apart and swallow her whole, let her grow into it like roots.

Ellie glances over her shoulder, at a horrified Lev, and then further back. She can see the glow of a flashlight up ahead, intermingling with the large stadium lights surrounding Lago Vista, and she knows that Abby isn’t too far behind. “Hanna, you need to let me see it – okay?”

“ _No_ ,” Hanna argues, but Ellie is already reaching for her hand and pulling it away. The tip of the knife digs into Ellie’s palm as she wedges it out of her hand. Her flashlight is focused down on the bite, at the ring of blood soaked through her jeans, at the bubbled, infected skin.

She sees Tess’ face in her mind. Tess, who she’d hardly known for more than a couple days but who she sometimes missed so much it made her want to throw up. _“I was bitten an hour ago,”_ Tess had cursed at Joel, pointing at the raw, angry bite on her collarbone. _“And it’s already worse. This is fucking real, Joel.”_

When Riley and Ellie had been bitten, they’d talked about how poetic it would be to lose their minds together. Ellie watched Riley’s bite get bigger, deadlier, and she kept telling Ellie stories about Angel Knives late into the night, all the way back from the mall. Her voice had grown hoarse the more they walked, words coming out slower and not so much walking as she was staggering. _“I just need to sleep,”_ Riley had said before they got back to base, and she’d taken Ellie’s hand and pulled her into a park, to an old, rickety merry-go-round. _“Lay with me.”_

It was like she already knew – even before Ellie had realized it. Like she knew that these were her last moments, even if they weren’t Ellie’s. She hadn’t slept at all that night, watching the mutation take hold of Riley’s body, watching her best friend disappear and be replaced with something different – a shell with spores.

Her bite was embedded in her skin like a scar, and Ellie kept staring at her own bite in panic, in fear that she was next. Maybe they should have fired the guns at each other – at least they could have gone out together. _“Please don’t wake up,”_ Ellie had pleaded, and she’d slid off the merry-go-round in the same breath that Riley’s eyes, that weren’t Riley’s eyes at all, opened. She was staring at Ellie, staring _into_ Ellie, and then she was sitting up, and she was lunging forward.

She’d fired the gun before she could think twice about it, the bullet lodging into her best friend’s forehead and clattering to the ground in the same breath. Her fingers trembled and the gunshot rang and rang and rang in her ears. No. 

_No._

She doesn’t know how many more times she can watch people die.

Ellie’s gaze stays focused on the bite before she’s looking back at Hanna. “How old is the bite, Hanna?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Hanna repeats herself, “my dad will kill me. He’ll kill me himself, I know he will. I can’t _go_ home, please…just let me...” she’s reaching for the knife, but Ellie is tentative in handing it over. The bite looks fresh, but it doesn’t look like it’s spreading. It’s not like Riley’s bite and it’s not like Tess’. It’s not brutal and angry, it’s not attacking her the way it attacked Riley.

“Lev?” Abby’s voice calls out into the woods, and Lev waves his flashlight along the tree lines so that Abby can find them. She is bolting for him, kneeling beside Lev and pushing his hair away from his forehead. “Are you okay?”

Lev nods, albeit weakly, but his gaze is on Hanna. “This is my fault,” he utters.

“No, it’s not,” Hanna argues, shaking her head back at him. “I shouldn’t… I shouldn’t have come out. I shouldn’t have brought you with me, I—”

“Oh my god,” Abby’s voice cuts Hanna from her train of thought. “Is that a fucking bite?” She looks back at Lev. “What _happened_?”

“They were ambushed,” Ellie answers for the both of them, and she’s keeping Hanna’s blade in her hands as she pushes back, fingers tugging at her short strands of hair in frustration. She stands up after a moment, holding a hand up to Hanna – as if she’s actually about to run off somewhere. “Stay here,” she advises pointlessly, and then she’s moving to Abby.

"The bite is a few hours old,” Ellie tells her, but Abby is hardly paying attention – transfixed on Hanna. She can practically hear her charting out her and Lev’s escape plan from here.

“I don’t care when she got it,” Abby counters.

Ellie shakes her head back at her. “It should be worse than it is. The infection normally spreads in less than an hour after exposure. You _know_ that.”

“What are you saying?”

It’s stupid – it’s naïve, probably, and definitely foolish. Maybe not all cases of the bite are the same. Maybe it doesn’t always happen all at once. “I don’t know,” she finds herself backing down. “But we need to get her out of here and get her back to town.”

"So they can blow all of our fucking heads off in the town square?”

Lev stands up, coming between them. “Ellie’s right,” he says shakily. He looks back at Hanna for a second, swallowing hard and fixing his gaze back on Ellie. “It happened this _morning_ ,” he tells her quietly. “She blacked out when it happened, freaked out and fucking… _fainted_. I thought she was _dead_. I didn’t know what to do; I couldn’t just leave her and find you.” He looks up at the night sky above them, the stars playing peek-a-boo through the leaves. “She should already be gone.” His focus turn to Abby. “You _know_ that.”

Abby looks back over at Hanna – Hanna, who is so ready to take herself off the game board entirely – before she’s looking back at Lev. She doesn’t say a word, merely watches him in some sort of silent discussion, before she’s looking back at Ellie. “We need to wrap her ankle.”

Ellie blinks back at her in surprise. “What are we supposed to do when—”

“—Ellie, I don’t think she’s _going to_ ,” Lev’s voice comes out like gravel. He’s looking at her with an unspoken plea. “I think she already would have, and I think you know that.”

It’s not possible. She knows she’s the only one. She knows that what Joel told her on the way back from the hospital was bullshit – there weren’t _other immune subjects_. There was only her. The weight of the world was on Ellie’s shoulders, and she’d come to terms with that.

But Hanna. But _Hanna_.

Not possible.

Ever the same, she drops her bag to the grass beneath her feet and crouches down, rummaging until she finds a roll of bandages and handing it up to Abby. Abby moves wordlessly, clearly on a mission, and kneels beside Hanna.

“You can’t _touch it_ ,” Hanna yelps, but Abby is already moving her hand to her leg and unrolling the bandage.

“You don’t have spores,” Abby counters, and Ellie can hear the unspoken _“yet”_ from where she stands behind her. “But we need to wrap the wound. I have some medicine in my bag I can give you for the pain.”

Hanna winces as the bandage tightens around her ankle. “Why are you doing this for me?” she asks, voice pathetic and trembling. “I’m just going to…” she doesn’t manage to get the word out before she’s blinking away more tears. “This is so _stupid_.”

Abby finishes wrapping the bite, offering her arm to Hanna to help pull her up. “We’re going to keep an eye on it, okay?”

“But, if I _do_ something—”

“—then we’ll take care of it,” Abby assures her, and from beside Ellie, Lev is sighing with relief and pushing tears away with the heels of his hands. “But for now, we need to get you out of the woods and back to town, okay?”

Ellie doesn’t know how Abby can talk to her like she truly _believes_ all of this is going to be okay in the end – but somehow, some- _fucking_ -how, she almost makes Ellie believe it, too.

* * *

Last night, Lydia had told Ellie on the walk home that she could stop by her home any time she wanted, if she ever wanted to talk or look at old pictures with her _(“we can both make fun of Joel’s terrible taste in clothes from the nineties!”)._ She knows that she doesn’t have a big window of time before Hanna’s dad will be looking for them, so she nods Abby toward the house on the corner of town, and Abby has Hanna cradled in her arms.

In Santa Barbara, it was how she carried Lev. She didn’t care about Ellie, didn’t care about the fact that Ellie was there and likely there _for her_. She had gone straight for Lev, and she had carried him to the shore. _“There are boats,”_ she had told Ellie, and it wasn’t until Ellie was leaving Santa Barbara with aching bones and gravel in her veins that she realized that Abby meant that they could both be _free_ and _safe_.

Ellie shakes the thoughts away, rapping on Lydia’s door frame and stepping back in relief when she sees the front door open, soft light glowing onto where they stand on the porch. Her smile fades quickly as her eyes fall onto Hanna, and she’s opening her door wide, without a second thought. “Oh my god, what happened?” she demands as Abby moves with Hanna to the couch in the living room.

“Can I talk to you?” Ellie responds, and she is reaching for Lydia’s wrist to stop her from moving any closer to Hanna – and, more specifically, Hanna’s bite.

Lydia halts, turning back to look at her with worry clouding her blue eyes. “What’s wrong with Hanna? What happened?”

Ellie holds her arm out to Lydia in response, showing her the winding leaf and the butterfly, tracing her fingers over the bumps that she’ll never get rid of. “I was bit when I was fourteen,” she explains, voice steady and calm.

From the corner of her eye, she sees Abby and Lev sharing a look. Hanna is sitting up in a panic before Abby nudges her back down to the couch cushions.

Lydia looks at Ellie like she’s a stranger, shaking her head back at her. “I don’t understand.”

Ellie traces the tattoo slowly, methodically, a dance she’s had memorized for years. “I was bit when I was fourteen, and nothing ever happened. It was weeks before I met Joel – his…” her voice is hitched for a moment, clearing her throat before she carries on. “The reason that Joel and I met was because he was supposed to take me to… to the Fireflies, to do tests on me. Because I’m immune. Because they believed—”

“—you’re the cure,” the words come out grim, almost hostile, and Ellie blinks back at her in surprise. “You… _that’s why_ Joel was in Salt Lake City?”

She thinks back to Lydia’s words from the night before, how she had told her that word traveled fast when it needed to. How much had Tommy told her?

“Yeah,” Ellie manages to find her voice again. “They thought I was their only shot at the cure. But when Joel found out that the only way to _make_ me the cure they would have to kill me, he…” she shakes her head, forcing the tears away before they take hold of her. “That’s not the point,” she says decisively. “The point is, I thought I was the only one. Every bite I’ve ever seen has fucked a person up within an hour. It happens every time.”

Lydia is piecing the puzzle together with horror in her gaze, looking back at Hanna in terror. “She was _bit_?” She pushes past Ellie, pushes into the living room, kneeling down in front of the couch and looking at the bandage wrapped around her ankle.

“Lydia,” Hanna says softly, “I promise it isn’t—”

Lydia holds a hand up to stop her, and she turns back to look at Ellie sharply from over her shoulder. “You said you’re immune,” she clarifies, and all Ellie can do is nod, “then unwrap this. Let me see.”

She swallows hard, stepping forward and crouching down beside Hanna. The tears are freely spilling down Hanna’s cheeks and she covers her face with her hands as Ellie slowly unwraps blood-soaked bandage from the wound. It already looks better than it did when they left the woods an hour ago, and the bile in Ellie’s empty stomach twists and turns violently. This can’t be possible. This _isn’t_ possible.

“Holy shit,” Lydia breathes out, and Ellie is quickly shaking her head at her, trying to keep her from spiraling, from teetering straight off the edge.

“She was bit this morning, Lydia,” Ellie’s voice is quiet as she speaks. “This _morning_. She should be gone by now. She shouldn’t be here. You _know_ that.”

“My dad’s mission was to find a cure,” Abby’s voice quickly drags Ellie out of her trance, turning to look at her. Abby isn’t looking at Lydia or Ellie, her gaze is staying fixed on Hanna. “He did so many tests – tests before Ellie. None of them were as promising as she sounded, but… I don’t think Ellie was ever the _only_ one.” Her gaze lifts, eyes meeting Lydia’s, and Ellie is an invisible wall between them that’s ready to crumble. “I don’t think it’s possible that she ever was.” She looks back down at Hanna. “She should be dead by now.”

Hanna whimpers from the couch, and Lev places a nervous hand on her shoulder.

Lydia is still shaking her head, still in disbelief, and she lets out a slow and unsteady breath. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about any of this,” she says after a moment or two. “Her dad is beside himself – and how do you expect me to bring him to her when she’s like _this_?”

“I can explain—”

“—no,” Lydia cuts Ellie off. “No, I don’t think you should explain anything else.” She stands up, misty-eyed, and shakes her head. “You’ll have to keep an eye on her for the night. Keep your gun on you. If anything happens, you take care of it.”

“Got it,” Ellie is hollow in her response.

Lydia looks down at Hanna as Hanna stares back up at her, a stranger who wasn’t a stranger just this morning. With one final shake of her head, she is turning out of the living room and retreating upstairs, muttering under her breath.

“How can she talk about her like that?” Lev asks, staring up at the stairs after Lydia is out of sight, before turning back to Abby and Ellie. “How can she act like she doesn’t _know her_ or care about her?”

“It’s the bite,” Ellie says drily. “The fear takes over everything else. The second you’re bit, you’re not a person anymore – you’re an enemy, and a problem that needs to be solved.” She stands from the floor, pacing in a circle for a moment before taking a seat in the leather chair in the corner. “You guys should go get some sleep.” Her eyes land on Abby for a moment before her gaze travels to Lev. “You need sleep.”

Lev shakes his head. “I’m not leaving.”

Abby’s expression is unreadable, but she merely moves from where she had been crouched by the couch to the other chair in the corner. She doesn’t say a word about her reasoning for staying – she doesn’t say anything at all. 

She’s just there.

* * *

Lev is asleep with his back against the couch, and all Ellie can do is think – and think, and think – about everything that led her to this moment. To how she should have listened to Abby when she said a thousand times that she was leaving for Galveston and wasn’t going to stick around. She never should have asked them to go to Lago Vista. They should have parted ways in Austin, and maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

But what if? _What if?_ What if Abby was right when she said that she didn’t think Ellie could be the only immune one out there? Why would she say that? Was it to comfort Lydia? Was it to comfort Hanna, or Ellie?

“Do you actually believe I’m not the only one?” Ellie manages to gather her voice, to ask the question that’s lurking in the shadows of her mind.

“I didn’t want to,” Abby’s voice is slow, but firm. “But… Dad had all these recorders, he kept notes on everything. I remember them from when I was a kid. All he wanted was to find a cure, and the Fireflies kept finding people that didn’t react to the bite. But nothing ever came of it, nothing ever _worked_.” Her eyes stay fixed on Hanna. “He was so happy when Marlene told him about you that he fucking danced around our living room. He _danced_.”

Ellie feels a brick where her throat should be, and it’s plunging straight down to the pit of her stomach.

Abby doesn’t say anything after that. Instead, she keeps watch over Hanna, and then she turns back to look at Ellie, looking at her like she’s seeing her for the first time. Not as the bad guy, just as a person.

Her fingertips tremble and she curls them into her palm, looking away from Abby and looking down at her lap. She sits still and quiet before she speaks up. “My best friend and I got bit at the same time,” she confesses softly. “Her name was Riley. We got bit the same night and we talked about how it’d be… fucking _poetic_ and shit, you know? Die together, lose our minds together, take over the world as flesh-eating monsters together. But she kept getting worse, and I didn’t.” The tears are no longer stinging her eyes, but making a steady path down her cheeks. “She was gone before the sun came up.”

“What did you do?” Abby’s gaze is a burning flame against her face.

Ellie squeezes her eyes shut, sinking further back into the chair, as if she leans back just enough, it’ll consume her whole. “I killed her.” 

She’s never said it out loud. Not to Joel, not to Dina or Jesse. She’s never talked about that night, never fessed up to what happened to Riley, to the way the gun felt like a detonated bomb in her hand, the way she ran all the way home and cried, and cried, and cried until Marlene found her. Until Marlene found out about everything. Until she became something that needed to be smuggled and poked at and cut wide open.

“You saved her,” Abby clarifies quietly. “Nobody should have to become a fucking runner. Or worse.”

Ellie sniffs, batting at her face with her hands to wipe the tears away. “It was so stupid,” she says, and her voice is crackling with a humorless laugh. “Like… I felt like I was _missing out_. That she was experiencing something without me, that I should have been right there with her.” Her trembling arm stretches out against the arm of the chair and Abby’s eyes trail the path her fingertip takes as it traces her tattoo. “I poured acid on my arm after Salt Lake,” she admits quietly. “I didn’t want anyone to see it. Didn’t want anyone to know.”

“The tattoo,” Abby points out, and all Ellie can do is nod.

“Ex-girlfriend did it,” she adds on. “I just wanted to feel fucking normal.”

“Fat chance.”

Abby says it so bluntly, without a trace of malice in her tone, and it makes Ellie laugh.

“Yeah,” Ellie replies, shaking her head and turning back to look at Abby. “Fat chance.”

* * *

Ellie is jolted awake at the sound of banging at the door, heart nearly flying out of her body. She fucking _fell asleep_. Her panicked eyes follow the room, but it looks like everyone else is already awake. Hanna is sitting up on the couch and Lev is sitting beside her, Abby is watching them from where she stays in her chair before turning to look at Ellie.

“No change,” Abby says. “We’ve been quizzing her since she woke up. No memory loss, her speech hasn't slowed. No change.”

Hanna’s eyes are razor-focused on the door. “It’s my dad,” she quietly notes.

“How do you know?” Lev asks.

“I just do.” She shrinks further back into the couch as a voice is heard from the other side of the door.

_“LYDIA,”_ a man’s voice booms.

Lydia is hurrying down the stairs, hardly sending a glance to the living room before she opens the door. A man stands on the other end, light skin and a fire in his eyes, gun slung over his shoulder. He pushes past her, pushes into the house. “Is Hanna here?”

“Hank, we need to talk…” Lydia’s words fall on deaf ears as he spots Hanna sitting across the living room.

Startled, his eyes widen, and then they travel to her unwrapped ankle, and he’s gripping the butt of his rifle. “What did you do to my daughter?” he spits out venom with each word, quickly looking to Ellie for answers, before looking to Abby and then to Lev. His eyes are narrowing as he focuses in on Lev. “You were the one that was with her yesterday. You _let this_ happen.”

“Hey,” Abby is quickly standing up, holding a hand up to stop the man – Hank – from going any closer to Lev. “Hanna was bit a day ago.”

He looks ill, shoving past Abby and moving to Hanna. He won’t touch her, won’t step any closer to her than a few feet. “How could you let this happen? How could you become one of those _things_?”

“I’m not,” Hanna says weakly. “I’m…” her vision moves down to her ankle, which looks better than it did yesterday. “Daddy, nothing’s happening.”

He scoffs and he looks as delirious as Tommy and Maria had been when they’d found out about Ellie’s bite, as stupefied as Marlene had been when she realized what was happening. “That’s not possible,” he argues. “It’s not. It’s a delay in the cordyceps.”

“Newly infected are runners within _hours_ ,” Ellie argues, but Abby is speaking over her.

“Sir, I’ve only ever come into contact with one other immune person before,” she starts out slowly, and Ellie waits for her big reveal, waits for the moment she needs to stand up and show yet another person the one thing that isolates her from everybody else in the world. “It’s rare, it’s really fucking rare. But my father spent his entire career looking for immune patients, he knew the signs.” She looks back at Hanna, and then at her father. “Hanna isn’t turning. She already would have turned. You know that.”

Tears fill Hank’s brown eyes and he doesn’t bother pushing them away. He merely stays focused on his daughter. “What do we do?” he asks.

Lev looks at Abby and Abby looks back at Lev, and Ellie wonders if there was a conversation that she missed when she fell asleep. Abby is speaking up a moment later. “We’re going to the Fireflies base in Galveston,” she explains, and Ellie feels the knots in her gut tightening. “There are doctors there. I think there’s still a chance to find a cure – and the more immune people we find, the higher that chance gets.”

Ellie can see Lydia retracing their conversation from the night before, and she looks back at Abby. “I don’t think that’s a wise idea.”

“I think it’s the only option we’ve got,” Abby argues. “How are you going to explain to the entire town what happened to her without them turning on her in a _second_?”

Hank looks at Hanna with tired eyes, with anguish tightening his jaw, and then he’s looking back at Abby and Ellie. “You’ll be with her?”

“Yeah,” Ellie finds herself blurting out, surprising herself more than anyone else. Abby’s eyes widen in shock, turning to look at her. But Ellie just keeps talking, mouth moving faster than her mind. “We’ll be with her. We’ll make sure nothing bad happens to her.”

Hank looks back at Hanna. “Is this what you want?”

Ellie can still hear Hanna’s wails from the night before, her fears of her father taking her out himself if he truly believed she was a danger, and Hanna merely nods her head back at him. “I don’t think there’s really any other choice,” she says meekly. “If there’s a chance that there’s a cure – that I could be a part of that? – there isn’t another choice.”

On the porch with Joel the night before she lost him forever, she chastised him for taking away her chance to let her life _mean something_ , from taking away her choice. And here is Hanna, telling her father that there _is_ no choice, that this is what she has to do.

And somehow, that tells Ellie exactly what _she_ has to do, too.

* * *

“You don’t have to come with us, you know,” Abby is telling her when they get back to the room, packing the few belongings they have back into their bags.

Ellie shakes her head, moving to zip the guitar back into its case and slinging it across her back. “Yes, I do,” she argues.

“Why?”

Ellie’s eyes bore into Abby’s, and she knows that she knows. Without a word. Without a prayer. She knows.

Ellie says it anyway.

“Because I need my life to matter.”

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤ feel free to yell at me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/soulmeetsbody) and [tumblr](http://summerskin.tumblr.com)
> 
> see you in the next chapter ❤


	9. look for the light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wow. lot to unpack here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥️ once again (and always) thank you so much for caring about this fic and reading each update. it makes me so happy 🥺
> 
> this is my longest update to date (!), so buckle up and enjoy. ♥️
> 
> *BRIEF SUICIDE TW*

* * *

* * *

_i’m a foolish, fragile spine,_

_i want all that is not mine_

* * *

* * *

" _Because I need my life to matter.”_

Ellie is talking to Lydia near the stables, and her words continue echoing through the chambers of Abby’s mind. They’d had this conversation before – after everything had gone so wrong in New Mexico – and Ellie had told her that she wanted her life to matter, that she felt robbed of her choice. And now, she had that choice presented to her in the form of the Fireflies camp in Galveston, and she sounded like she wanted to go through with what had first started over six years before.

Abby pulls her hand away from her mouth as she realizes that she’s started gnawing on her thumbnail somewhere between the hotel and the stables, only catching bits and pieces of Ellie and Lydia’s conversation before she’s glancing around for Lev. Lev, who is never too far off, is currently standing beside Hanna while she stiffly hugs her father goodbye.

“You’re sure about this?” Hank is asking, and Abby realizes he’s pointing the question at _her_ when she meets his gaze. “You’re sure nothing bad will happen to her?”

At this point, Abby doesn’t know _what_ is going to happen to her. All she knows is that a bite in a small community breeds nothing but trouble. If they don’t want to kill her, they’ll shun her. They’ll think she is crazy, that she’s putting everyone at risk.

The one potentially immune patient that her father had come into contact with before the discovery of “the girl from the Boston QZ,” was an older man named Todd – and Todd put the barrel of a gun in his mouth before Abby’s dad could take a proper look at him. He’d left notes behind that he felt like he was a “ticking time bomb” and that he couldn’t handle it. Ellie had become a world of possibilities for her father, for the Fireflies as a whole. And that flame had been almost as quickly extinguished. Ellie is looking at this like a second chance, an opportunity to right past wrongs, and Abby doesn’t know why the mere thought is causing her insides to churn.

“We’ll take care of her,” Abby assures him, because that much – if nothing else – is something she can promise.

Hank is tentative at kissing Hanna’s forehead, rigid as he pulls away, and Abby wants to yell at him, to tell him that he’s not going to get sick from hugging his own daughter – that he should fucking _hold her_ when she needs it.

Hanna is pushing tears away from her eyes and stepping away, bag hiking up over her shoulder as she turns to look at Lev. “Am I riding with you on Artemis?” she asks.

“Actually,” Ellie’s voice breaks through, moving closer to approach them. “Lydia is offering a trade.”

Abby’s eyebrow quirks. “A trade?”

“The horses for a car.”

Lev’s face shifts, just a little, but it’s enough to speak volumes. “What?”

“A car, a siphon hose so we can get gas. And the horses will be here if we come back for them.”

“What if something _happens_ to them?” Lev blurts out. “To Artemis?”

“Nothing will happen to her, Lev,” Lydia offers from behind Ellie. “We’ll make sure she’s looked after, fed, brushed. It’ll probably be good for her to rest – for all of them to rest. You’ve rode them cross country.”

Lev swallows hard, and his fingers twist around each other in a nervous fidget. He steps away from Hanna to move closer to the stables, past Lydia and Ellie, and to where Artemis is grazing near the back in her own designated stall. Abby follows after him, leaning against the wooden frame of the stable as Lev approaches his horse. “I’ll be back,” he says softly, and he’s pressing against her cheek. “Okay? Yara would’ve loved you.”

When Lev had first met Alice, he’d aimed his bow at her out of fear. Animals frightened him, but he had been attached to Artemis from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. He holds onto her for a second longer before he’s turning back around and looking back at Abby. “You never even _named_ yours.”

“I know,” Abby replies, voice dry in her throat. “It makes it hurt a little less when you have to say goodbye.” Lev’s eyes widen, and Abby is quickly holding up a hand to stop him. “But this isn’t a goodbye, kid. Just a ‘see you later.’ I’ll figure out a name before we make it back here, okay?”

“See you later,” Lev echoes, turning back to look at Artemis. “See you later.”

* * *

The vehicle that’s been traded to them is an SUV, maroon and beat-up, and Lev is looking around it in awe from where he sits in the back. “Are you sure you know how to use one of these?” he asks Ellie, and she looks over her shoulder at him from where she sits in the driver’s seat.

“I’ve got this,” she assures him, twisting the key in the ignition and smiling to herself a moment later as it rumbles to life. “Haven’t driven one in a while, but I don’t think it’s too hard to figure out.”

“How reassuring,” Abby notes drily, and Ellie shoots her a look.

“Do _you_ want to drive?” she asks pointedly. “You seem more suited for a tank.”

“If that’s a dig at my muscles, thank you for the compliment.”

Ellie snorts, shaking her head. “I can’t stand you,” she says, but she says it without malice. She says it in a way that, for some reason, makes Abby’s stomach twist into a knot. Ellie leans forward, fiddling with the buttons on the center console, and a second later, she’s sticking her head back out the window. “Lydia,” she calls out. “You wouldn’t happen to have any, like… music, would you?”

Abby’s eyebrows raise, and from the rearview mirror, she can see Lev and Hanna exchanging a look.

"As a matter of fact,” Lydia muses with a small smile, before she’s taking a few steps backwards. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?” She turns on her heel and makes her way down the street, in the direction of her house.

Lev leans forward in his seat. “This thing plays _music_?”

Ellie’s smile is crooked, quirking up a little higher on one side as she looks back at Lev with eyebrows raised. “Hell yeah it does.”

The last time Abby heard music – really _heard_ music, music from the old world – had been over two years ago – shortly after the incident in Jackson, before everything turned on its head once and for all. She’d been in the WLF base with the Salt Lake crew, and Manny was dancing around his and Abby’s apartment, drunk out of his mind and singing along. He’d pulled a barely-pregnant Mel up and dipped her low to the ground before swaying back and forth with her. “I was only five when this came out, but _fuck,_ I remember it. It was all over the radio when the outbreak started, my mom sang along every time,” he crooned, face faltering slightly in memory. “I miss it.”

Abby had spent so long holding onto that song, holding onto _that_ memory – especially after losing Manny, losing Owen and Mel and Nick and Nora and Leah and _everyone_. She forced herself to remember the song, to keep the happy moments and memories alive in her mind even when it seemed impossible. To remember the joyful music, the banjo and the twang of the band’s voices as they sang about belonging to each other, about being each other’s sweethearts. She remembered Manny’s smile, the way that Mel had laughed to the point that even Abby forgot why she was so upset with her (at least for a moment).

She sinks back against her seat at the memory, and Ellie is looking down at the steering wheel, seemingly lost in thoughts of her own before Lydia approaches them with a few flat square cases in her hand. “Glad I never parted with these,” she hums, passing them through the window and to Ellie. “The top one was one of Joel’s favorites,” she adds on with a wink and a small smile that makes Abby’s gaze quickly avert. She looks to the back of the vehicle, to where Hanna and Lev sit, before her eyes are finding Abby and Ellie’s once more. “Take care of each other,” she says softly. “Come back in one piece.”

Abby chews down on her bottom lip for a moment, Ellie holding onto the top case of the stack but passing the rest over to Abby without a second thought. “Pick one,” she tells her as Lydia bids them a final farewell and Ellie looks down at the little plastic box in her hands.

“You don’t want that one?” Abby asks.

“No,” Ellie says quickly, bluntly, opening up the armrest between them and sliding it into the compartment. “So, you pick one.”

Abby shuffles through them once and then again, finally settling on a bright blue case with a large crack across the middle of it, the text reading _NOW! THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 36_. “This, I guess.”

Lev sits forward with rapt attention, and Hanna gives an excited hum from beside him as Ellie slides it into the CD player and gives it a moment to whirr to life. The music starts bright, peppy guitars, all leading into a girl singing nonsense about being pretty without any make-up on.

Ellie’s face quickly shifts into a grimace, nose wrinkling up as she’s pulling away from the Lago Vista community and out onto the road. “What the _fuck_ is this?” Her gaze darts to Abby. “What did you pick? What _is this_?”

Abby breaks into a lopsided grin before she can stop it from happening – and _oh_ , would she have stopped it if she could – flipping the CD case over in her hand and reading the song title off to Ellie. “What,” she teases, voice deadpan as she looks back at the girl next to her, “you don’t like… _Teenage Dream_?”

Ellie groans. “God, old people had weird fucking taste in music.”

“I don’t know,” Lev offers from the backseat after a moment, “I think I kind of like it.”

* * *

Before they’d left, Lydia had updated Lev’s Texas map with her own markers to show them which roads to take to get to Galveston. The pandemic had stopped most cars right in their tracks on the interstate, which left mostly winding backroads throughout South Texas.

Lev is asleep as they pass the sign that reads HOUSTON – 59 MILES, and Hanna’s gaze is fixed on him for a few moments before she’s sitting up and leaning forward. “How long did it take you to figure out you were immune?” she asks softly, and Abby watches as Ellie’s focus lifts, eyes meeting Hanna’s in the mirror.

“Figured it out pretty fast,” Ellie says casually, as if this is a completely normal conversation. “Everybody changes fucking quick, you know? And I didn’t. And I kept waiting for it to be my turn, and my turn never happened. It never came.” She lifts her arm from the steering wheel so that Hanna can see the branches and leaves tattooed into her skin. “Seven years.”

“Wow,” Hanna breathes out. “Were you scared?”

“Yeah,” Ellie turns her head for a moment, turning to look at her, before her eyes are back on the road. “For a lot of reasons. You kind of feel alone – because you _are_ alone. You watch people around you bite and change within hours or even _minutes_ , and then they’re not the people that you knew anymore. Those people are gone. And you watch it happen to so many people and know that it won’t happen to _you_. And that’s, like, a good feeling, I guess, but it’s fucking scary at the same time.”

Hanna nods, and Abby notices the way she shrinks into herself, hand protectively placed over the healing bite on her ankle. “I thought I was going to die,” she admits. “I think I fainted so that I didn’t have to see it happen. It was like my body was just letting me go.” Hanna looks down at her hand for a moment before she’s looking back at Ellie. “Why didn’t you ever go to the Fireflies?” she asks, and all of Abby’s nerves wake up at once. “Did they not have anyone that could run tests on you? To see if you could be part of the cure?”

Abby looks at Ellie, and Ellie stares straight ahead at the road. Her jaw is clenched, mouth a stubborn line. Everything flashes through her mind at once, the way it often does. That day almost six years ago in the hospital, Owen trying to drag her away from her dad’s lifeless body before she saw all of her worst fears brought to life. Marlene and everyone screaming about how they let Joel get away with “the girl.” Always “the girl” and never Ellie.

Owen was the one who found Marlene’s body in the parking garage after Joel had gotten away with Ellie, and Abby had been in such a mental paralysis that she hadn’t found out Marlene was dead until two days after the fact. Joel had taken out an entire hospital on his warpath to get to Ellie, to get her away from the wires and tubes and scalpels. And Abby _knows_ that she would do the same thing for Lev. She knows it with every bone in her body and it makes her sick to think about. Not because of her love for Lev – never that – but because the Abby from six years ago would have never dreamed of having somebody worth killing for, worth _dying_ for.

"They, uh,” Ellie clears her throat, finally finding an answer to Hanna’s question, “they wanted to find more people. They knew they were out there.”

“People like me?” Hanna clarifies.

“Exactly.” Ellie clears her throat after another beat. “So, we’ll get you to Galveston, we’ll meet with the Fireflies, and we’ll figure out what happens next. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she echoes, sinking back against the backseat. The hand not on her ankle is resting idled by Lev, and after a moment, she scoots in closer toward him. Her head curls toward his shoulder like a tulip craving sunlight, and just like that, she drifts off to sleep.

“I don’t know how they can just sleep like that,” Abby notes, glancing back at them before turning and looking back at the road. “I don’t think I could ever sleep in a car.” She barely sleeps, as it is.

Ellie nods, humming along with the music in the car, but low enough that it’s like it’s just for her. “Joel always told me to sleep if we were driving,” she points out. “Never could. Tried, but mostly for his sake. I mostly just read comics and tried to think about being anywhere but where I was.”

“We drove out to Seattle after Salt Lake,” Abby adds on after a second, the words seemingly escaping her out of their own free will. “That was the last time I was in a car for more than a half an hour. I didn’t sleep.” Couldn’t sleep, rather. It wasn’t that it was a choice – it was a decision that had been made for her.

“Yeah,” is all that Ellie can muster in response, voice dry and crackling.

Abby looks back at Ellie like she’s willing her eyes to meet her own. When they do, all she can do is echo back, “Yeah.”

Ellie breaks the look after a second that stretches long past that, looking back out the windshield. “What road were we supposed to turn on?”

Thankful for the distraction, Abby unfolds the map that she’d snagged from Lev’s clutched hands when he’d fallen asleep somewhere between Austin and San Marcos. “The San Felipe exit?” she offers after a moment, catching the large circle that Lydia drew around the town. “And then it says to get on 1458 from there. Apparently it was under construction when the outbreak hit so there weren’t too many cars.”

Ellie hums in response, siding the car into the next lane and nodding her head absentmindedly in time with the music. They’d given up on the first CD that Abby had selected in favor of one called _Viva La Vida,_ which Ellie had already skipped three tracks on with varying grunts of annoyance.

“How are we doing on gas?” Abby asks after a moment or two of shared, not exactly uncomfortable silence.

“Might need to find somewhere before we get into Houston,” Ellie comments, tilting her head and leaning in to read the gauge in front of the steering wheel. “But this thing doesn’t look like it’s moved down any since we left Austin.”

"You sure it’s not broken?”

"I think I would know if it was broken, thank you.”

“Because those don’t sound like famous last words at all.”

Abby cracks a small laugh at the irritated look Ellie shoots her, looking down at her lap as soon as she catches herself.

Ellie sighs a moment later, seeing the sign up ahead that reads _SAN FELIPE_ and swerving onto the exit ramp. “Lucky for you, I know how to use a siphon hose. I’m like a goddamn _savant_ with one.”

“I’m so comforted.”

“Well, you _should_ be. I turn left here, yeah?”

It’s terrifying, Abby realizes. This entire concept – the mere idea of traveling in a car with Ellie Williams, of having a fucking rapport with her, of being able to talk to her like they’re _friends_. She knows it’s terrifying by the way it makes her stomach knot up, by the way her fingers dig tightly into her palm and her heart plunges down every time Ellie looks at her. Like she’s waiting, holding her breath in anticipation of the balloon popping, of everything retracting and sending them back where they started. Like she’ll wake up and be standing over Joel Miller’s body holding a bloody golf club, meeting Ellie’s gaze mere moments before her face is kicked in.

 _I need my life to matter_ , Abby hears her insisting as Ellie makes the turn onto the next road. She leans forward and cranks the music up, desperately trying to shut Ellie up once and for all.

* * *

Ellie is humming along with the song wafting through the speakers when Abby sees the first sign of hope that she’s seen in a long, long time. It’s spray-painted on a sign that reads _GALVESTON – 10 MILES._ The Firefly symbol staring back at her. Her heart is becoming a lump in her throat, and she sits up higher.

“Fireflies,” Ellie notes, but Abby doesn’t need her to tell her. She knows. Fuck, she knows.

“Holy shit,” Abby breathes out, and she makes a vow to herself to not cry. Not now and not ever, but especially not in front of Ellie. “Holy shit.”

Ellie glances over at Abby for a lingered moment. “How are we supposed to know where to find them?”

“They’ll find us,” Abby assures her. “I think, at least. I don’t know.”

“Can’t be that hard to figure out,” she notes back at her as she gets off at the next exit. There are more and more cars up ahead, a long line of broken-down vehicles, and Abby knows that their time on the road is about to very quickly come to an end.

She smirks at Ellie as she idles the car to a stop behind a truck that reads CHEVY in giant letters along the back. “And you didn’t even run out of gas.”

“Shouldn’t doubt me,” Ellie chips back before she’s turning in her seat to look at Lev and Hanna. “Rise and shine.”

Hanna’s head lifts from Lev’s shoulder, and Lev is groggy as he sits up bleary-eyed. “We there?” he asks.

“Not yet,” Abby replies. “But almost. We have to hoof it the rest of the way.”

Lev wrinkles his nose at her. “We have to _what_?”

“Walk,” Hanna answers before Abby has the chance. “It’s a… figure of speech, I think.”

“Like a horse,” Lev says under his breath, reaching over to wiggle with the door handle for a moment before it opens and he can step out onto the crowded highway off-ramp.

Abby snorts despite herself, stepping out of the SUV and following suit. “Yeah, like a horse.” She makes her way to the back of the truck, popping open the trunk so that she can pull out her bag. She hoists it over her shoulder before tossing Lev his own. She grabs Hanna’s backpack and Ellie’s rucksack and closes the hatchback door.

“It shouldn’t be too far from here,” she observes, squinting up ahead at the road and looking for any sign, any other Firefly tags, but to no avail. “I mean, probably.” A beat. “Right?”

“Right,” Lev pipes in, holding his hand out to Abby. “I’ll take my map back now.”

“Hey, I got us to Galveston, didn’t I?”

Lev shoots her a pointed look and doesn’t move his hand, and Abby places the map into his palm a moment later. He turns his head in confusion at how it’s not so much folded as it is crumpled up before spreading it out so that he can properly assess where they are. “There should be Firefly symbols, right?”

“We passed one on the way here,” Ellie answers for Abby, grabbing her rucksack from Abby’s outstretched hand and hooking it over her shoulder. “I think we just need to keep following the road.”

Hanna holds onto the straps of her backpack, marching forward ahead of them, and Lev watches her in bewilderment before jogging after her. “Wait up!”

The two don’t stop to see if Abby or Ellie are following them, and Abby’s jaw drops as the two of them wind their way between cars and carry on ahead of them. “I feel like I just got _ditched_.”

“You definitely just got ditched,” Ellie scoffs, and Abby glares back at her. Ellie smiles – small and quiet and barely there, and Abby finds herself curling and uncurling her fingers from her palm as she looks away. “I mean, I guess we _both_ got ditched. If we’re being technical.”

“I’ll take the technicality,” Abby notes, the two of them falling into step with one another and making their way up the chewed-up highway. She grabs the straps of her bag more to give her hands something to do, keeping her gaze focused on Lev and Hanna up ahead. His hair is so bright in the sunlight that it’s practically _shining_ , and he’s listening aptly as Hanna speaks to him with animated gestures and a bright smile. “It’s good that he has her.” It doesn’t come out like a question, even if she feels like that’s exactly what it is.

 _Is it_ good that he found her? That everything happened that ultimately led them to this moment and this realization and this situation? Would Hanna consider it a good thing?

Ellie doesn’t say anything at first, gaze fixed on Lev and Hanna up ahead. “I still can’t believe I’m not the only one.”

“Really?” Abby asks, and Ellie blinks back at her in confusion. “I mean. I don’t know. I think there was a while where I was sure that you were the only one, too. Like, the only one that would ever really _stick_ – but I think it’s kind of narrow-minded to think that.” She gives Ellie a wry, hesitant smile after a moment or two. “I mean, you’re not _that_ special.”

If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that Ellie _blushed_ just then. Just as quickly, she’s snapped out of it. “I guess,” she admits. “But that means that there are immune people all over the fucking place.”

“The whole world, probably,” Abby adds on quietly. “It’s a big world.”

“I used to imagine leaving the country – driving to Canada, or figuring out how to fly an airplane and getting the fuck out of here.”

“I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think planes are really much of a possibility anymore.”

“You never know,” Ellie says wistfully. “Like you said, it’s a big world.” She bites down on her lip for a second, and Abby tries to focus on keeping an eye on Lev and Hanna. Keeping her eyes anywhere else before she scares herself more than she already has. “It’d be kind of cool to see more of it.”

_I need my life to matter, I need my life to matter, I need my life to matter._

“Maybe that can be our next move.”

The words escape Abby before she can stop them and she wishes that, then and there, time could just _stop_. The cracks in the road could break apart and crumble, and Abby could be sucked into the rubble, never to be heard from again. There are so many reasons as to why that _can’t_ be their next move, and only a few of them have to do with the fact that Ellie’s not playing the game like she has many moves _left_. This was never supposed to be part of the plan – Ellie has never been a part of the plan, so _why_ is she factored in? Why doesn’t that seem like the scariest possibility?

The blush Ellie had been wearing returns with a vengeance, and she looks up ahead at Lev and Hanna. “We should go check the map.”

“Yeah,” Abby is all but bolting down the road at those six words. “Yeah, we should do that.”

* * *

Following the road turns out to be the right move, and Abby tries to abandon the feeling of familiarity that she’s carrying with her, that’s bringing her back to the moments leading up to 2425 Constance, the foolish hope that had rested atop her shoulders. Lev has been so sure of this, was so _proud_ of the work he did to track Galveston down, it seems damn near disrespectful to not take it seriously, to stop believing in hope.

“Another Firefly,” Lev calls out over his shoulder, pointing ahead at the logo sprayed onto a stop sign. “It has an arrow under it. Think it means we follow it?”

“Yeah, I think so, kid,” Abby says with a tentative smile and she wishes that Owen could be here to see this. To see _them_. To see that she followed a lead and _made it_. They round the corner at the stop sign, leading them down a street of run-down fast food restaurants and gas stations and permanently stalled vehicles.

“What are the Fireflies like?” Hanna asks, turning her head over her shoulder to look at Abby. Even with the nap she’d taken in the car, she still looks like she hasn’t slept in a week, stress taking shape under her eyes in the form of dark half-moons.

“Family,” is Abby’s initial answer, but she pauses after a second. “When the outbreak started, everything was sectioned off by FEDRA. Food was rationed, people were barely scraping by in quarantine zones all over the place. And when the Fireflies started, it was a rebellion, and they were looking for a cure and for a life outside of quarantine zones and the military controlling everything.” From the corner of her eye, she can feel Ellie’s eyes on her, burning a hole into her cheek. “I grew up with the Fireflies, my dad and his friend, Marlene, were really big parts of it. But…”

Flashing red lights. Sirens blaring. Her father in a pool of his own blood, his nurses shot execution style and lined up against the wall. Joel goddamn Miller. Ellie’s gaze is piercing her, challenging her to keep talking and see what happens next.

“They fell apart a few years ago. And everyone just sort of scattered. My unit moved to Seattle, there was talk of some of them forming in California, _here_ , and… I don’t know. Probably a lot of places.”

Ellie’s eyes flicker away, cast down on her footsteps on the pavement.

“And Seattle is where you met Lev?”

A bashful smile curls up at the corners of Lev’s mouth at the mention of his name.

“Yeah,” Abby replies. “Lot of shit went down in Seattle.”

Ellie chimes in with a quiet, hollow, “Yeah,” before she’s looking up ahead. “We should stop and see if we can siphon some gas,” she is quick at changing the subject, and Abby’s eyebrow raises at her. “For later.”

For _later_? Does Ellie even need to _worry_ about later? She’s on her fucking death march and dragging the rest of them with her.

“Good idea,” Hanna says with a small smile, reaching her hand out to Ellie. “My dad taught me a lot about siphon hoses growing up – can I try?”

Ellie blinks, seemingly taken aback, before reaching into her bag and pulling out the siphon hose, handing it to her. Lev hands her the red gas can he’s been carrying since they left the SUV however many miles back.

Hanna nods back at them, looking toward the gas station to the right and jogging across the parking lot. Abby hangs back, watching as she moves from the pumps with no luck to a parked car in front of the shattered glass doors.

Eventually, Hanna settles for the large fuel tank along the side of the building, a triumphant smile beaming as she finds herself able to attach the siphon hose and pump out some gas. “Got it!” she calls out to them.

A moment later, and the sound of breaking glass can be heard from inside the gas station. Hanna stills with her hand on the fuel tank, eyes widening and looking back at the trio standing in the parking lot.

Clickers.

Ellie reaches for her bow, and Hanna is quick at screwing the lid onto the gas can. She’s pulling her knife out of the sheath at her hip and quickly diving for the side of the building as the clicker screams, staggering through the shards of glass along the pavement and teetering closer and closer. Another clicker follows suit before it is being shoved aside, an angry runner with wispy silver hair bolting past it and charging, seemingly, straight for Abby. Ellie fires a shot into the second clicker’s skull and Lev’s arrow flies into the one approaching Hanna.

Abby’s gun is cocked in her hand, but before she can shoot, Hanna is pouncing onto the runner’s shoulders and driving her blade into his throat. The runner shrieks, collapsing to the ground in a heap, and Hanna wipes her brow before reaching down and grabbing the bottle of pills from the pocket of its jacket.

“I think this place was a success,” Hanna breezes out, smiling proudly and nudging the runner aside with her foot and turning back for where she’d left her gas can on the pavement. She plucks Ellie and Lev’s arrows out of the clicker corpses, making her way back to the three of them. She hands over the arrows and tosses the bottle of pills into Abby’s hand. “Sorry for yelling earlier. I didn’t mean to, like… wake them up.”

Lev is still watching her in bewilderment, a beating heart with dark eyes, and he quickly shakes his head at her. “That…was really cool.”

 _Cool_.

Abby is nothing more than a bystander, Hanna and Lev looking at each other like they’re sharing a secret. “I think we make a good team,” Hanna tells him, and Lev is quick at nodding back at her.

She falls back into step beside him, the group of them marching forward down the street, in search of their next clue, their next move.

“They grow up so fast,” Ellie teases, and Abby is ready to burst. A second later, Ellie is bumping her shoulder against Abby’s – and she knows she just might.

* * *

The breadcrumb trail of Firefly logos leads them to a garage door in a subdivision and Ellie blinks at it for a moment before looking at Abby. “What do you think is inside?”

“Probably a comm system,” she notes. “To get in touch with the base.”

The last time she made it to this chapter, she was grabbed by the Rattlers. She’d had her hair hacked off, been strung up beside Lev and left to die for months; until she lost so many of the muscles she’d worked hard for, until she was a ghost of who she’d once been. The Rattlers weren’t here, too, were they?

"Abby,” Lev says softly, because he knows. Of course, he knows. She’ll never forget the fear that had lit up ever nerve in her body watching them grab Lev, watching them hurt him. “It’s okay.”

She blanches, stepping back one, two, three times. She stays planted on the sidewalk and she thinks if she tried hard enough, she could plant herself underneath the concrete. She shakes her head, hands trembling. Everything is going dark, and still, and so fucking hazy. She swallows down her breaths, short and frantic. What is _happening_ to her?

“Hey,” Ellie speaks up, a light through the fog, and reaches her hand out for Abby’s wrist. She quickly shakes it away, shaking her head back at them.

“No,” she counters. “No. Fuck.” She is not going to cry. She is not going to have another goddamn _meltdown_ right now. 

“We’ll go in,” Ellie says, nodding her head back toward Hanna. “Just tell me what to say over the comm. Tell me what you need. Okay?”

A fucking fever dream. Abby blinks, letting herself nod after another moment of coming to terms with the fact that she can’t do this again. “Say you’re looking for the Fireflies. Tell them you know Jerry Anderson’s daughter. Don’t tell them where you are, j-just…” her teeth chatter together despite the Texas heat, and she wants to shrink until she’s a blade of grass. “Just ask them where you can find them.”

Ellie nods, looking over at Hanna and jerking her head toward the window by the front door. “Follow me,” she tells her, casting one last look over her shoulder at Abby before making her way up the driveway with Hanna at her heels.

She crouches by the doorway for a moment, clearly listening for infected, before she moves to the window and swings her baseball bat forward. The sound of shattering glass breaks through the silence of the neighborhood, and Ellie crawls through the window before Hanna follows suit.

Lev’s fingers curl around themselves and he watches Ellie and Hanna until they disappear into the house, before turning back to Abby. “I think this is real,” he says quietly, voice firm and full of the confidence Abby isn’t sure she has anymore. “I know you’re scared.”

“I don’t even know what I am anymore,” Abby responds, shaking her head and looking over her shoulder just in case somebody wants to sneak up on them. “I just need this to be over.”

Lev nods, a little grim, and looks down at his beat-up shoes. “What’s going to happen to Hanna?” he asks after a quiet second.

_I need my life to matter._

“I don’t know,” Abby notes. “I think Ellie is trying to make sure that nothing does.”

Lev is still for a moment, watching the house before taking a slow breath. “You mean she’s going to let the Fireflies use her as the cure?”

Abby swallows the lump she doesn’t need forming in her throat. “I think so, yeah.”

His eyes darken, gaze cast back down at the pavement. “Oh.” A beat. “I thought the Fireflies would have to kil—”

“—yeah,” Abby is quick to cut him off. She desperately wants to not be fazed by this, to not care, because she shouldn’t care. But at the same time, it’s a reality she can’t allow to sink in, a picture she’s not ready to look at.

Lev nods, rigid and somber. “There has to be another way,” he adds on, turning back to look at her. “I mean, if Hanna’s immune, then… then there are _others_.”

“And we’re always going to wind up at the same fucking spot, Lev,” Abby counters. “Someone’s life for the cure. That’s the way it has to be.”

She had been so sure that day in Salt Lake City, the day she’d told her dad that if she were in Ellie’s shoes, she would want to be the cure. And she meant that – and _still_ means that. That fact does nothing to change the twisted, gnarled knots forming in her gut. She doesn’t know if anything will. She just wants to know _why_.

The garage door is rattling open a few minutes later, Hanna and Ellie stepping out with their heads held high. Hanna smiles brightly, first at Abby, and then to Lev. “They said to keep following the Fireflies and they’ll find us at the last one.”

“This way,” Ellie pipes in, pointing down at the Firefly painted at the base of the driveway, leading them further into the neighborhood.

Lev is looking at Abby in question before looking back at Ellie with his face fallen. Ellie is walking in step with Abby and Hanna is a few feet ahead, rambling on about the house and how there had been a room in it that you could only access with a knife.

“So, of course, I used mine,” she says, smiling back at Abby and Ellie. “It wasn’t… super exciting, I guess, but there were a lot of books on the shelves. And more of those shiny rings that play music. I grabbed a few that I thought looked the prettiest, so we can listen to them the next time we find a car.”

“Ergo, if the music sucks, it’s on Hanna, not me,” Ellie jokes, as if this is all completely casual, as if this is all going to be the new fucking normal.

"Hey!” Hanna argues, but the smile on her face indicates no ill will.

It’s crazy, Abby thinks to herself, how everyone can keep acting like everything is going to stay just as it is now. Like everything isn’t about to change in a matter of hours. Hanna is too hopeful for her own good – and if the way that Lev is looking at her is any indication, she’s bringing him right down with her.

* * *

The final Firefly logo is sprayed onto the wall of a hardware store and it has a dozen smaller fireflies painted around it. The word _“Wait”_ is written out underneath the symbol, and the uneasiness settles down deep in Abby’s bones. Everything could go wrong and everything could go wrong fast. She can’t process the fact that this is real, that everything they’ve been working toward is within an arm’s reach. Completely palpable, and utterly terrifying.

She doesn’t have long to assess the situation before the rumble of a truck can be heard from behind them. Hanna stands up a little straighter in surprise, peering around Lev to see where the noise is coming from. It’s a large green Humvee, the Firefly emblem sprawled across the passenger door making Abby’s knees shake. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

This is real.

The truck idles beside them for only a moment before the driver’s side door is opening and an older man is hopping out. Something flickers in him, a strobe of awareness as his eyes travel along the four of them and settle on Abby. “You’re Jerry’s girl,” he says, and every wall built around her crumbles at the name. He steps closer to them. “You probably don’t remember me. I was with your dad at Eastern Colorado – you couldn’t’ve been more than five or six. When they made the move up to Salt Lake, I headed South.” He holds a hand out to her. “Name’s Graham.”

“Hi,” Abby manages to find her voice, shaking his hand after another stilled moment. “I’m, uh. I’m Abby,” her heart is a wildfire in her chest as she gestures to the others around her. “This is Lev, and Ellie, and Hanna.”

“Hanna,” Graham echoes the name. “My little girl’s name was Hanna.” He gets a wistful, faraway look in his eyes for a moment before he’s shaking it away and nodding back toward his truck. “Y’all want to head to the base? We can talk more after you get some food in you.”

Ellie clears her throat, nodding and speaking when Abby can’t find her voice. “Food sounds really good right now.”

Graham smiles and it crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Then let’s go.” He helps them with their bags, throwing them into the back of the truck and holding the back door open for Hanna and Lev and Ellie to climb in. Abby catches herself hanging back without meaning to, without realization, and Graham opens the passenger door, as well. “You were part of the WLF, right?”

“Long time ago,” Abby is quick to say, even if it wasn’t _that_ long ago. It feels like another lifetime, another Abby that was loyal and stupid and angry at the world. “Not anymore.”

“What do we do when we’re lost in the darkness?” Graham queries with a slight nod of his head.

The tears are welling up in Abby’s eyes before she can stop them, flashes of her father and Marlene and every member of the Salt Lake Crew that she lost flickering through the darkest corners of her mind. “We look for the light.”

* * *

A long bridge connects the rest of Texas to Galveston Island, and Abby idly sits in the passenger seat in a fog the entire way to the base. Galveston is a long island, surround by beaches and pastel homes on stilts. The main Firefly base is divided into three pyramid-like structures, one of which is a former aquarium. When Abby makes that discovery, she wants to peel back her own skin just to feel a different type of pain.

Lev is a steady stone at her side, and Abby feels like Ellie’s gaze is never too far away. As if they need to be worried about _her_ – as if she’s the one willing to make such an ultimate sacrifice.

Graham gets them settled in the expansive, pale pink hotel that serves as their dormitory, one room for Abby and Lev and the other for Hanna and Ellie, and the overwhelming, looming question of _WHAT NOW?_ hangs heavy over Abby’s head.

“Do you think anyone from Seattle made it out here?” Lev asks, sitting at the foot of one of the double beds and looking up at the ceiling. It is painted blue with chipped white clouds staring back at him. 

He meets Abby’s gaze a moment later, but she is shaking her head. “If they did, I doubt they’d want to see me.”

Lev nods, and for a minute, they stay in that bubble of silence between one another. But then, _but then_ , he’s moving closer to her with eyebrows raised. “What’s going on with you?”

She scoffs, plays oblivious because maybe she _is_ oblivious. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been weird – weirder – since yesterday. Is it because of Hanna being with us?”

“What? No,” Abby is shaking her head, ignoring the way the weight is being lifted off her shoulders at Lev’s question, “of course not. I… I like her.”

“You don’t like _anyone_ ,” Lev argues.

“I like you, don’t I?”

"Because you have to.”

“I don’t have to do _anything_ , thank you very much,” Abby argues, ruffling a hand through his mop of yellow-blond hair. “Probably gonna have to touch this up soon, you know.”

“You’re changing the lesson—”

“—subject—”

“—yeah, that.”

Abby stands, pacing across the hotel room without meaning to. “I’m not changing the subject, there’s just… I don’t know. It’s a lot, okay? Being here, being back in Firefly territory. It’s a lot. Us getting here has been a fucking _lot_ , and—”

She lets herself drift off when she sees the wandering look on Lev’s face, eyes cast low to the ground. He sucks in his teeth for a moment and shakes his head. “I don’t want Ellie to die.”

He admits it softly, like a secret, and the room goes deathly still around them. “Lev—” 

“—I know that’s what _she_ wants, and I know it’s what she’s _wanted_ but I don’t want that. I don’t want her to _die_ , and I don’t want Hanna to die.” His breath catches for a second, looking back at her. “Do you think there’s other immune people out there?”

“Yeah, I do,” the words come out of her like an exhale.

“Do you think we could find them?”

“I don’t think there’s any way to just _find_ them, Lev. Do you know how insane it is that we found _Hanna_? That doesn’t just happen. It’s like finding a needle in a fucking stack of needles.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Abby shakes her head, trying to give herself a moment to breathe. “I don’t even know where we would begin with something like that,” she says after a moment or two. “But if Ellie wants to do this, then she’ll be the fucking _vaccine_ , Lev. Everybody will be cured—”

“—at the price of _her_ or _Hanna_ or someone else who doesn’t deserve it,” Lev argues, standing up from the bed. “I don’t like it.”

Abby leans against the TV stand against the wall, head bowed. “I know,” she says quietly. “I don’t, either.”

“I know you don’t,” Lev adds after a moment of watching her. “I think that’s why you’ve been so upset. You don’t want to lose her, either.”

She may not know much, but she knows that she _hates_ the way those seven words sound. Abby quickly shakes her head, waving her hands back at him. “I wouldn’t say it’s that I don’t want to lose _her_ ,” she argues. “Like, I could give a shit, it’s just…” she trails off when she sees Lev looking back at her, knowing and smug without even trying. “For your sake,” she clarifies, “I don’t want anything to happen to her. Okay?”

There is a rap at the door, and Lev has his lips twisted into _way_ too smug of a smirk. “Yeah,” he hums. “Okay.”

Abby wonders if she would survive if she threw herself out the window when Lev opens the door to the room and Ellie and Hanna are standing on the other side.

“Figure we should go grab a bite,” Ellie offers. “You hungry?”

“Yeah,” Lev agrees, turning his head over his shoulder to look at Abby. “Hungry?”

Abby wishes she could say no, that she could just tell Lev to go on without her, but her stomach betrays her by growling and giving her away. “Yeah,” she admits begrudgingly, “I guess I could eat.”

Lev moves past Ellie to Hanna, leaning in and softly asking her if she’s doing okay. A week ago, they were barely getting to Austin, and she doesn’t know if any amount of proper preparation could have ever prepared her for _this_.

She falls into step beside Ellie down the hall, and for a minute, they don’t say anything. They’re both taking in the hotel – the walls that aren’t nearly as torn apart as they should be after all this time, the lights overhead and the way the elevator fucking _works_. “Graham said they haven’t seen infected around here in almost a _year_ ,” Abby says as they make their way into the elevator and press the button to get to the lobby. “A fucking _year_.”

“They probably stop them at the bridge,” Ellie opines. “Probably easy to keep them at bay when you have a whole fucking island at your disposal.”

Abby scuffs the toe of her boot against the tiled floor, looking up after a moment to watch Lev in amusement as he stares around the elevator in wonder. “It’s a _box_ and it’s _moving_.”

The lobby leads them to the hotel’s restaurant, which has been converted to a cafeteria. There are tables spread out, soldiers and civilians alike sitting together with trays of food in front of them.

At the head of one of these tables is Graham, and his face lights up when he sees the quartet coming into the cafeteria. He stands up, waving his hand to the few empty seats left at his table. “Saved y’all some spots,” he says with a warm smile. “Go grab some food and take a seat.”

Their trays are loaded up with roasted vegetables and fried chicken and it brings Abby back so, so quickly to early mornings and late evenings at the dining hall in Seattle. Sitting at a table with her friends, talking about strategies, trying her hardest to not direct every single conversation back to any potential leads she’s found to Joel’s whereabouts. Besides everything else that existed within the walls of the WLF base, the sense of community was the strongest vessel. It’s overwhelming to see so many people who grew up just like her, who felt the same sense of community, all sitting right in one room.

"Your rooms okay?” Graham asks, bringing her momentarily back to reality.

Ellie nods, taking a bite of her food followed by a long swig of her water.

Abby’s eyes linger on her for a moment longer than necessary – until she feels Lev’s eyes on _her_ and quickly averts her own over to Graham. “How many of you are there?”

“Few hundred,” Graham says with an affirmative nod. “Getting a little bigger every week. Some wanderers, some just trying to find their way back home.”

“Are you still looking for a cure?”

The table goes silent at Lev’s question, and Abby swiftly kicks him in the shin from under the table, firing a warning glance in his direction. Ellie casts a sideways glance toward him and Hanna stares down at her tray. Graham is hardly caught off-guard, merely nodding back at Lev. “Every day. We like to think we’re getting closer. Got a few really good doctors, a lot of research coming in and out.”

Lev’s eyes are fixed on Ellie, but Ellie is looking back at Graham. “Would I be able to talk to you?” she asks, and Abby’s heart is an anvil racing to the very bit of her stomach. “Privately?”

Graham gives Ellie a wry smile, laughing into his glass before taking a sip. “You sound like you’re about to tell me you have the cure for mankind in your back pocket.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

He quickly sobers, sitting up a little higher and looking at her – really, properly looking at her. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“Ellie.”

“Ellie,” Graham repeats to himself. “Why does the name ring a bell?”

“She’s immune,” the words escape Abby before she can swallow them back down, and Graham’s fork falls to his tray, metal clanging against plastic. She knows she messed up, she can hear Ellie and Lev and every bone in her body shouting at her from here. What the _fuck —_ no, _why_ the fuck had she said that? If the way that Ellie moves, slow and calculated, from the corner of her eye is any indication, she knows this night is going to be long.

“You’re the girl,” Graham breathes out, and Ellie glares back at Abby, hard and angry and dumbfounded. “The Salt Lake girl. Marlene’s girl.”

“I’m not anybody’s girl,” Ellie retorts. “I’m just somebody who got bit and made it out alive.”

Graham shakes his head back at her in bewilderment and awe. “Well, Ellie, I’ll be goddamned. Maybe the two of us _do_ need to have a talk.”

From across the table, Hanna has pushed her tray aside, hands nervously folded in her lap. Lev places a hand tentatively on her shoulder, shooting a worried look back at Abby.

Abby tries to reason with herself, tries to convince herself that all she was doing was biting the bullet, ripping off the bandage. But maybe, _maybe_ , she was just trying to hurt herself before someone else beat her to it.

* * *

“What the _fuck_ was that?” Ellie is hissing the moment they get back to the lobby, wrenching a hand around Abby’s wrist and keeping her from making any steps further away from her. “What the _fuck_ , Abby?”

“All I did was tell him what you were going to.”

“It wasn’t yours to tell!” Ellie sputters, shaking her head back at her. “This is _my_ thing, so what the fuck business do you think you have getting involved? What part of this is about _you_ , Abby? What part?”

Abby swallows hard and rigid, shaking her head back at her. “I don’t _know_ , okay? He was going to find out either way, and it just _happened_. I don’t know why you’re so mad, I don’t see what fucking difference any of this makes.”

“I know you’re dying to get rid of me, but next time, keep my business out of your mouth.”

She opens her mouth to interject, to argue, but nothing comes out and her whatever words she could have found to say merely die on her tongue. “I’m sorry,” her voice is soft, almost unrecognizable; words she never imagined to say to Ellie hanging in the balance between them.

“I need a drink,” Ellie grumbles, pushing past Abby and away from Lev and Hanna’s curious stares, marching straight out of the hotel lobby without another word.

Abby watches the doors swinging closed after her and Lev keeps his eyes burning onto her before she finally turns his way. “ _What_ , Lev?”

“Why would you tell him that?” he asks quietly. “I thought… I thought we could figure something out.”

Abby digs her fingers into her hair. “I don’t think there’s anything to figure out, kid. I think… this is just. What it is.”

Whatever the fuck that means.

* * *

Lev and Hanna have fallen asleep on the double beds in Lev and Abby’s room across from one another when Abby slips out of the hotel room with a soft click of the door behind her. Ellie still hasn’t come back since she left after dinner, and Abby hates the way that the realization has stirred up every single nerve inside of her.

It’s her fault, and she knows that. At this point, _everything_ was her fault. She spoke out of turn, acted without thinking. And for all she knows, Ellie could have fucking stomped all the way to the hospital and told the doctors to cut her open and get it over with.

She shudders at the thought, opting for the stairwell instead of the elevator, and crossing her arms over her chest as she steps out into the humid, breezy Texas air. The main Firefly base is close to the beach, a large boardwalk jutting out into the ocean ahead of her with a looming, dark Ferris Wheel that appears like more of a menacing, gargantuan shadow than it does anything else.

She approaches the beach hesitantly – as she always does when she sees a beach these days – and forces herself to keep going, keep moving forward. If nothing else, it’s a chance to clear her head. To fucking _breathe_. 

It’s like déjà vu, she realizes, when she spots Ellie up ahead, lying on her back with her jaw clenched and eyes focused on the stars overhead. She doesn’t appear to notice Abby, at first, and Abby knows that she should just turn and go back to the base, that she’s the last person Ellie could possibly want to see right now. 

But instead, however stupidly, she speaks. “We don’t have a good track record with beaches, you and me,” she offers up with a dry, awkward laugh.

Ellie’s face turns, the light from the floodlights along the boardwalk causing her eyes to glint back at her. Her lips are set in a firm line, but after a minute, one of the corners lifts up – just a little. “Yeah, you should watch yourself. I’ve got a knife in my back pocket.”

“You always do,” Abby hums, and then she hesitantly steps closer. She takes a seat next to her in the sand, but not close enough that Ellie will rip away from her at the contact. “I didn’t think we’d make it here.”

“I didn’t think _I’d_ make it here,” Ellie replies. Her gaze goes back up to the night sky.

“Why did you?”

“I already told you.”

Abby sits back, letting the palms of her hands press down into the sand, fingers curling into the cool earth. Her head rolls upward, looking up at the sprinkling of stars, before looking back at Ellie. “You’re really going to sacrifice yourself.”

Ellie doesn’t meet her gaze, swallowing hard and keeping her gaze up. “I don’t know if I’d call it a _sacrifice_.”

Abby’s stomach coils into a tight knot. “Okay, then what would you call it?”

“Finishing what your dad started.”

Every bone in Abby’s body goes cold. A lump begins to form in her throat before she can stop it, and she tries to swallow it down. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since she lost her dad – almost _six years_ – it still feels like getting hit in the head with a hammer every time. And it’s jarring to hear Ellie, of all people, bringing him up. To talk about him so _casually_. “My dad didn’t _want_ that to be the solution, you know.”

“If I can help that many more people be immune—”

“—what if you can’t?” The words are out of Abby’s mouth before they’ve even registered through her mind. “What if it doesn’t work?”

"What?”

Abby swallows hard and she shakes her head after a second. “I don’t know,” she says, trying to gather herself back into the here and the now. “I… my dad was so confident, and everyone believed in him because of it. But what if it doesn’t work? What if you die for _nothing_?”

"Then at least I died trying.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Abby groans, and her hands move to cover her face on instinct. “How _noble_ , Ellie.”

Ellie turns to look back up at the sky. “Well, I’m not going to let Hanna do it.”

The green monster returns, crawling under her skin, telling her to speak up, to say anything. “I think we can find another way.”

She has no fucking idea if that’s true and feels it in her bones that it’s not. She told Lev there was no other way, and she believed that even if she didn’t want to.

“There _is_ no other way, Abs,” Ellie argues softly, and Abby’s head pops up just as Ellie’s sinks lower into the ground. “Abby,” she corrects herself under her breath. “Why do you care, anyway?”

“I don’t,” Abby is quick to counter, but a second later, she’s betraying herself again, “know. I don’t know.”

Ellie snorts, closing her eyes for one, two, three held breaths before opening them back up. “Why did you tell Graham about me?”

“I don’t know,” Abby offers, as pathetic and weak of a response as it is. “It just happened.” She swallows the lump threatening to form in her throat and digs back into the sand. “I think I just wanted to get it over with.”

“Get it over with,” Ellie repeats, bitter and quiet. “I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

“That’s not what I fucking meant and you know it.”

It’s a long, stagnant moment between the two of them before Ellie is turning away, looking back at the stars – probably so she doesn’t have to look at Abby anymore. Abby can’t even blame her. She is about to get up to leave, to claim this as the stupid idea that it was and make her way back to the hotel, but the sound of Ellie’s voice stops her in her tracks.

“I told Joel once that if I had been around before the outbreak – or, like, lived in some alternate universe where this shit wasn’t a reality – I would want to be an astronaut.”

It’s a subject change, but it’s a welcome one; it’s one that makes Abby feel like she can breathe again, at least for a moment. “An astronaut?”

“Yeah,” she says with a little laugh, more to herself than to Abby. And if this is how she wants to spend her last hours, then Abby isn’t going to stop her. “And Joel… he took that and fucking ran with it, you know? Found me books on the constellations, took me to a science museum for my sixteenth birthday. Found these stupid plastic stars at some party supply store that glow in the dark and hung them on my ceiling in Jackson.” She falls quiet for a moment. “I thought it’d be really nice to learn about how big the universe is – fucking _colossal_ , you know?”

There is a heavy thrum in Abby’s chest, a tightening of chords and chambers, but she finds herself nodding, watching Ellie speak like she’s not even there. “I’d want to be a zoologist,” she admits, more to send her mind wandering in a different direction than it currently was heading.

"A zoologist? Like…working with animals?”

“Kind of, yeah,” she says softly. “Observing animals, studying them, taking care of them. Learning about their behavior and their habitats…” she trails off after a moment, folding her fingers together in front of her until they’re resting flat on her stomach. “In Salt Lake, we lived right by the zoo, and we looked after the animals that came through.”

“There were giraffes,” Ellie notes, voice blending in with the waves dancing up and down the shore. “I saw them.”

It catches her off-guard, but only for a moment. A moment of realization, of awareness that they were in the same place at the exact same time. That everything in their lives changed at the exact same second in two very different directions. 

“Yeah,” Abby is smiling, much to her own surprise, and her stomach churns with something familiar but foreign at the same time – like when she’d jumped into the water off of a Ferris wheel, facing her deepest fears just to be closer to him. Never, ever close enough. “Giraffes, zebras, tigers… I learned a lot about them from my dad, from books I picked up in the gift shops. And I think that if this was a different turn of events, that’s what I’d want to do. Make sure they had a safe place to live.”

“What a fucking dream that would be. A safe place to live,” Ellie murmurs, closing her eyes until Abby stirs them open once more.

“Do you know the constellations?”

“Yeah,” Ellie blinks back at her for a second, like she’s taken aback, before looking up at the sky and swallowing hard. “I mean, I don’t, like, _know_ -know them, I guess, but I know bits and pieces and I think I remember some stuff.”

“Show me.”

Her chest is tight, fingers curling deeper into the sand just to find something to hold onto.

Ellie’s eyes stay fixed on Abby, trying to read her face, as if she’s holding her breath for a punchline. When it doesn’t come, Ellie breaks the stare and looks up ahead, lifting her hand and pointing. “See where it kind of looks like a pitchfork?”

Abby blinks up, long and slow, but all she sees are stars – dozens and dozens of stars. It reminds her of when she was a kid, when her dad used to ask her what she saw in the clouds. She felt like she was letting him down every single time she just said _clouds_. “No,” she confesses after a second.

Ellie laughs despite herself, a quiet, secret laugh, and before Abby can register what’s happening, she’s reaching across the sand and grabbing for Abby’s right wrist, pulling it up out of the sand and lifting it until she’s pointing, too.

Her skin is on fire, blood running through her veins like magma, and she wishes the waves would come further up the beach and drown her. Her pulse is vibrating, and she knows Ellie feels it – Ellie has to feel it. But if she does, she plays it cool, guiding Abby’s finger from one star to another to another, tracing invisible lines in the sky. 

“That’s Virgo,” Ellie murmurs, but she’s not looking at the stars.

She’s looking at Abby.

“Virgo,” Abby repeats, willing herself to look absolutely anywhere else – _forcing_ herself to. “Does it have a story?”

“Yeah,” Ellie notes after a second, awkwardly letting go of Abby’s hand. It sinks back to the sand and Abby screws her eyes shut. “It’s Persephone’s constellation, and she was the goddess of, like, harvesting and vegetation. That’s why the pitchfork goes up to that star right there,” Ellie points up and Abby knows that she should be looking, but she’s afraid of what her body will do to her if she opens her eyes again, “it’s holding a piece of wheat.”

The laugh escapes before Abby can stop it, trying to swallow it down and turning it into a snorted cough. “Oh my god,” she opens her eyes, looking back at Ellie with an eyebrow raised. “A piece of wheat?”

“Yeah, it’s _Persephone_ ,” Ellie counters, and she’s sitting up enough that she can shove Abby in the shoulder. “The pitchfork is technically her legs, and then—”

“—oh my _god_ ,” Abby groans, and Ellie shoves her again. Abby feels it down to her ankles and that realization makes her stomach clench.

“Shut _up_ , I’m not making this up,” Ellie laughs. “It’s _Persephone_ , and the big star right there is…” Her eyes fall back on Abby and she reaches for her hand again. “If you’d actually look _up_ , you’d see what I’m talking about.”

“Ellie,” Abby’s voice comes out lower than she expects it to, almost husky – absolutely terrifying. “I will never see what you see.”

The world goes still for a moment – the ocean waves are nothing more than dull, white noise, and Abby doesn’t realize that she’s getting closer, and closer, and closer, until Ellie’s _right there_ and her lips are parting without Abby even asking for permission. 

Ellie’s mouth is softer than Abby had pictured it would be – not that Abby had ever _pictured_ that at all, obviously – and they are a velvet crush against Abby’s. Her fingers curl into Abby’s short tufts of hair, dragging her in closer, and Abby only faintly realizes it’s Ellie’s bad hand when she’s tugging at the ends and pulling Abby on top of her.

Abby rolls over like it’s a reflex, arm pressed into the sand and bracing her above Ellie. She feels a tug at her bottom lip and it’s quickly soothed over with Ellie’s tongue, her other hand digging hard into Abby’s hip. Abby melts, heart pounding in her ears, and kisses her deeper, letting Ellie pull her under, letting her hook her leg around Abby’s hip to drag her down, down, down.

A small hitch of breath escapes between their mouths, and Ellie kisses her with hunger as she seals the gap. Everything moves faster, the world a cataclysmic and surreal haze around them. Abby’s free hand slides under the hem of Ellie’s shirt, tracing the scars and bumps of her stomach, and Ellie arches up off the sand, drawing her Abby closer.

Abby is only faintly aware of Ellie’s hands moving to tug her own shirt off and over her head when Ellie goes still underneath her, hands falling away and body dropping back down to the sand; the kiss ending with their lips wrenching apart, an abrupt release, and Abby bolts backwards like Ellie’s an electric current.

The fog lifts, Ellie staring at Abby with her breath uneven and ragged, and she’s scrambling up from the sand. She’s standing over her, and Abby has never felt so small in her entire life. “We should get some sleep,” Ellie says pathetically, voice coated in anguish and what could only possibly be regret. “Long day tomorrow.”

Abby wants to grab her, to pull her back into her and drag her into the sand until they’re buried like a treasure chest. She doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow and see what happens next. She wants everything and nothing at the exact same time.

But Ellie is backing further away, and Abby feels like she’s sinking lower and lower. “Yeah,” her voice is foreign, heavy on her tongue. “I’ll catch up.”

Ellie is gone without another word, disappearing into the evening like she was never there at all.

And maybe that’s for the best.

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥️ if you noticed, there were a few changes made to the story info. 
> 
> first thing: the next chapter is going to be the final chapter. 
> 
> second thing: the final chapter of the FIRST HALF of this story! 
> 
> i decided somewhere around the last few chapters that i didn't think the journey was necessarily over just yet but it seemed like this portion of the story would need to conclude before a new portion began, so i have decided to separate this fic into a two part-series called "the lucky ones" and i'm very excited about it! ♥️
> 
> ♥️ follow me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/soulmeetsbody)
> 
> ♥️ follow me on [tumblr](http://summerskin.tumblr.com)
> 
> ♥️ follow the story's [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=Jy2W-6RATtyMmcrR3MPQ7Q)
> 
> ok see you in the next update BYE! ♥️


	10. here is the church, here is the steeple.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
> 
> (no beta. we die like men.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO MY FRIENDS. 
> 
> it has been a while, and i just want to say thank you so much for hanging in there and being patient! i started a new job literally right after i posted the last chapter and was also in the process of finishing my degree, and _then_ studying for certification exams, and i knew that i wasn't going to be able to give this story (especially it's mid-way conclusion!) the attention that it deserved with all of that going on.
> 
> BUT FEAR NOT, FOR CHAPTER TEN IS HERE. it has been so cathartic to get all of this out and write this bout of feelings that has been swimming around inside my head since the end of june, so thank you so much for letting me share this story with you and for your kind words and kind messages and freaking _fan art_ that i've had sent to me for this (y'all BLOW ME AWAY).
> 
> so thank you so so so so so much. [here's some music for you as you dive into this final chapter.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2KazUcJfMw37uT388ib9uJ?si=NcMLMC_RTBS1ioqMGAhxng) please enjoy. this is not the end, this is merely a 'see you soon.'

* * *

* * *

_and if you’re still breathing,_

**_you’re the lucky ones._ **

* * *

* * *

Sometimes, Ellie forgets.

Sometimes, before she wakes up, she swears she can hear JJ cooing from his crib. She can feel Dina rolling into her shoulder, grumbling that it’s _“your turn, I’m begging you.”_ She can feel the sunlight streaming in through the window of their farmhouse bedroom. Everything is calm, and quiet, and real.

And then she wakes up, and then she remembers.

Sometimes, Ellie forgets about the road that led her to Abby and to Lev. She forgets – voluntarily or not – about lying on the floor of that mansion, weak and helpless and screaming for Joel to stand up. The image of Abby staring down at her bloodied and bruised form moments before Jordan kicked her face in only shows up sporadically, much like the memory of Abby holding a blade to Dina’s throat as her own form of payback for what Ellie had done to Mel.

 _"Good,”_ Abby had spat when Ellie cried to her that Dina was pregnant. _Good_.

Sometimes, she forgets about what happened the last time she was on a beach with Abby. Forgets how her body had been taken over by rage and delirium, anger and fear spitting at Abby and telling her that she couldn’t let her leave the beach. The madness had taken over, had rid her of everything that truly mattered to her. She was out for blood.

Two years later, and she is burrowing herself into Abby Anderson’s skin on a sticky beach in Texas and she still doesn’t feel like she’s close enough.

Ellie pushes blindly along the pier back toward the hotel the Fireflies have put them up in for the night, and there is a phantom pulse where Abby’s mouth was. She tries to force it away, into the furthest and darkest corner of her mind, locked up where she can no longer access it, but even Abby’s memory is persistent and annoying.

Tommy would kill her if he knew what she had done. He’d line up an entire Jackson firing squad with all cylinders fired straight at her. Dina would never talk to her again – and at the rate she’s going, she might not talk to her ever again either way.

And Joel.

Fucking _Joel_.

What did it fucking matter, anyway? She would be gone by tomorrow night. _Gone,_ gone. The way she was supposed to have been for the past six years.

Ellie pressed the heels of her palms flat against her eyes, closing her eyes against them and trying to catch her breath, to think of literally anything else.

 _“I will never see what you see,”_ Abby had murmured, and she’d said it with a low voice, with intent in her eyes. Every pent-up feeling of anger and longing and aggression and fear had boiled up to the surface, had manifested itself into the jolt of Abby’s teeth biting Ellie’s bottom lip.

“God, what the fuck are you doing, Ellie?” she groans to herself, rounding the corner into the light pink building, lit up by the glow of street lamps and work lights. “What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

She slips through the lobby, checking over her shoulder out of paranoia, expecting to see Abby’s tall frame loping behind her, too close and too far at the exact same time. Abby isn’t there, is probably avoiding Ellie as much as Ellie wants to be avoiding her. Making her way to the elevator, Ellie is about to press down on the _CLOSE DOORS_ button when a voice calls out through the lobby. “Ellie!”

Ellie lifts her gaze, spotting Graham bustling toward the doors, arm outstretched to keep it from closing her off to him. The hard knot in her gut tightens, sinking like a lead weight, and she tries to remind herself to breathe. This, after all, was the whole reason she was here in the first place. To finish what she had started, to make her life achieve the purpose she craved. Every step and move she’d made in the last four years since she’d found out what had really happened in Salt Lake City had been leading her to this moment, right here and right now.

“Glad I caught you,” Graham notes with a warm smile, pressing the _CLOSE DOORS_ button once more and hitting the button to the floor she and the others had been assigned for the night. “We haven’t had a chance to speak since dinner.”

Ellie feels like she could crawl out of her own skin at any moment, leg jiggling against the tiled elevator floor. “Look, about what Abby said—”

Graham holds a hand up to stop her. “I remember hearing about you, a long time ago. You were practically an urban legend. When Marlene told us, none of us believed her.”

Everything from the tunnels and beyond comes back only sometimes, and only in flashes. She knows that she’d been unconscious when the Fireflies had found her and Joel in the underbelly of Salt Lake City, but sometimes she can see hazy glimpses of needles poking into her skin, of being changed out of her clothes and placed in a hospital bed. The flashes are slow and foggy, never clear and never coherent – sometimes, she wonders if she dreamed them all up. If her mind was playing tricks on her as some bullshit coping mechanism.

“At the time,” Graham continues, “the idea of someone being immune, being the potential _cure_ … it was unheard of. And we never imagined it would _work_ , but we knew that we had to try, if we were ever given the chance.”

Ellie’s lip worries under her teeth out of nervous habit, and she twists and untwists her hands from where they’re folded together in front of her. She can’t speak, doesn’t know if she could even find the words if she _had_ anything to say. But, Graham carries on before she can dwell on it. “I wasn’t with Jerry’s crew when they went to Salt Lake, but when I heard about you… I knew you had to be important. I kept up with correspondence as best as I could after I headed south.”

The knot sinks harder and faster in Ellie’s gut and she finds herself fiddling with her fingers just to keep her hands busy, to keep oxygen flowing. “I didn’t know. About the surgery, or what it would cost, or what it meant. I didn’t know anything.”

“How old were you, thirteen?”

“Fourteen.” 

"It’s not a fourteen-year-old’s job to know those things, Ellie,” Graham has a tenderness to his voice that catches Ellie off-guard. A gentleness that she hasn’t heard from anyone in so long.

“The Fireflies disbanded because of… because of what happened. Because of me.”

Graham doesn’t say anything right away, keeping his gaze on her for a long moment before ultimately shaking his head. “We were going down either way, kiddo. Got to a point where a bunch of us forgot what we were even fightin’ for.”

The elevator rumbles to a stop as her floor number lights up, but Graham merely reaches his hand out to keep a hold on the doors as they slide open, and Ellie stays put where she is. Her eyes are fixed to a spot on the floor, right by the toe of her boot, but she lifts her head to look back at Graham just the same. “And you still need a cure,” she says it slowly, like she’s trying out the words on her tongue. “Right?”

“Of course.”

This is the moment, the defining, now-or-never moment. The moment she’s been waiting for since she realized what it was that she needed to do. She opened her mouth to speak, to turn herself over, but the words caught in her throat and stayed there. She’d had dreams like this before, dreams where she couldn’t talk, where her voice came out in nothing but hollow, muted rasps. She swallows, tries to find the words again, but now Graham is speaking over her.

“And with you, we’re one step closer to that.”

She sinks. “I know.” Her heart was rattling in her chest, between her ribs, and she swears she feels Abby swirling around her like smoke. There are phantom strokes along her abdomen, tracing the lines where Abby’s fingers had been. Had they really been there? Had that _really_ happened?

That can never happen again. Will never happen again. Needs to ha…

No, it doesn’t.

“Do you even have a doctor?” Ellie brings herself back to reality. “That could do a procedure like that?”

Graham is nodding back at her as if this is something that she should just _know_ , that’s common knowledge. “We have a team,” he tells her. “It felt hopeless for a while there, but we’ve been working hard with our research, with determining next steps. Fireflies always say that you should look for the light, and that’s something that we’ve never stopped doing.”

“So, you need to run tests on me, right? That’s what they did in Salt Lake.”

The elevator door longs to close, and Ellie steps between the doorway and the hallway so that it has nowhere else to go. 

"That will be the first step, yes. Determine the source and caliber of your immunity – the thing is, Ellie, there are multiple strains of the cordyceps mutation. It’s not as black and white as we once thought.” Graham peers around the otherwise empty hallway before returning his gaze to her. “Why don’t you come meet me by the marina in the morning, yeah? We can head over to the lab and discuss this there, where things can be more private.”

Ellie feels like she has rocks flowing in her bloodstream – the world around her moving heavy and slow, a chorus of _bad idea_ fluttering around her mind. “Tomorrow morning,” she says, voice not much more than a hum, and nods stiffly. “I’ll be there. I can do that.”

She makes her way out of the elevator and down the long stretch of hallway, back to the room that she’s sharing with Hanna for the night, and reminds herself – again, and again, and again – that this is what she wanted.

* * *

Hanna isn’t in the room when Ellie arrives, and she knows that, realistically, this probably means that she’s in the room that Abby shares with Lev. She fidgets in the doorway for a moment, pathetically calling a, “Hanna?” out into the room in case she’s in the bathroom (she’s not) before taking a few steps back out into the hallway. Abby’s room is a few down from Ellie’s, and she thinks that, realistically, she should have a few minutes of leeway before Abby shows up. After all, Abby hadn’t left the beach when she had, and she hadn’t seen her in the lobby or the elevator.

She raps on the door for a moment before jiggling the handle and stepping inside. Lev is asleep on the bed closest to the window, a blanket draped over his frame, but, Hanna is sitting up against the opposite headboard, eyes transfixed on the puckered skin on her ankle. Her eyes lift when she sees Ellie approaching and she gives her a nervous smile. “Hi,” she says softly. “I didn’t want to leave Lev alone in here.”

“It’s cool,” Ellie tries to sound casual. “Just, uh… I’ll see you whenever Abby gets back.” She is damn near making a running break for the door, an escape route out of this room, but Hanna’s voice manages to stop her in her tracks.

“Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

Hanna sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. “When does this stop being scary?”

Ellie looks down at her feet before reluctantly taking a seat at the edge of the bed. “It doesn’t,” she admits. Hanna’s face falls, but not a lot – like she’d expected exactly that answer. “I wish it did. I fucking poured acid on myself and got a tattoo over it just to try and make it all go away, like that would let me pretend it wasn’t there.” She looks at the slowly healing, broken skin of Hanna’s ankle; the teeth marks permanent, swollen indentations. “When it isn’t so bad, we can tattoo it for you.”

Hanna sits up slightly, trying the words out in her head. “Wait, really?”

“Really. Anything you want.”

The smile that lit up Hanna’s face almost makes the lie of a promise that Ellie knows she can’t keep worth it.

She knows that it’s wrong to not tell Hanna the full story, to not tell Hanna _why_ the vaccine hasn’t already been created – and maybe it’s selfish and stupid and hypocritical of her to _not_ tell her. Especially because of what happened between her and Joel, especially because she knows how much she hated losing her own freedom without getting a say in how it happened.

But Hanna doesn’t _need_ to know, does she? Because Ellie is taking care of it, because Ellie is going to fix this the way that it already should have been fixed. If Hanna could have already had the vaccine, the bite would never have hurt her or caused any of this in the first place.

...at the same time, how would they have known she was immune if a vaccine had already been in place?

No, that’s something else that she merely can’t afford to think about.

Her fingertips are curling into her palm, scratching with their bitten down, jagged lines into her flesh, and she wishes that she could convince Hanna to leave the room so that she didn’t have to hang around her and potentially run into Abby. Abby, who she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to face again.

But Hanna seems content right where she is, watching Lev sleep, and Ellie debates if _she_ should follow through with leaving the room instead. But then that would be leaving _Hanna_ alone, and…

“I really appreciate you looking out for me,” Hanna adds on after a moment, giving her a timid smile. “Like, actually bringing me with y’all. Letting me leave.” She fiddles with the frayed ends of her jacket sleeve. “I don’t know if I ever would have left Lago Vista.”

Ellie hesitates for a moment before responding. “I don’t know if leaving Lago Vista is something you’d really want to do, Han.”

"It is,” Hanna answers quickly, with the kind of certainty and confidence that Ellie used to carry high on her shoulders. There was a moment between losing Riley and finding a family with Joel that she became too big for her own skin. She was emboldened and tough and maybe that was partially because she was so angry at the entire goddamn world, but it made her confident. It made her _strong_. Sometimes, she wonders if that girl died on the operating table. Sometimes, she wishes she could do anything to bring her back.

Hanna continues, and it momentarily drives Ellie out of her stupor. “I’ve never left Lago Vista,” she says. “Never. They taught me to shoot a gun, but barely let me use it. They didn’t want me leaving the community, they didn’t think it was safe for me.” She stifles a sigh. “M-my mom died when I was a kid. She got bit. She _begged_ my dad to end her suffering, and he wouldn’t do it.” Ellie feels her body rocking backwards, leaning into the wall of the hotel room as Hanna wipes at her cheek with the back of her hand. “He let her turn, let her become one of those _things_. And then he killed her. He killed her _afterwards_. And then swore that he would never do that again, he would always take them out first. Lydia gave him an earful for endangering the community.” 

She pulls her knees up to her chest, folds her arms around them. “Nobody cared that she was my _mom_ anymore, and my dad never let me leave the community. Only if it was really serious, if we had _nobody_ , or if I was with him…” she sniffles, peeking over at Lev who is stirring slightly, rolling over. “I told Lev I could handle it, and I couldn’t. And then this happened.”

“Hanna—”

“— _but I’m glad it did_ ,” she adds on with a weak whisper. “I’m glad I’m _here_.”

Ellie shakes her head in disbelief, staring down at her shoes. “You could have died, Hanna.”

“But I didn’t,” Hanna argues. “I didn’t. I actually… _mean_ something now. I think that’s important. And I don’t think it would have done me any good to stay there.” She bites down on her lip, leaning back against the headboard for a moment before rocking forward. “You know what I was thinking?”

Ellie’s thumbnail has found its way between her teeth. “What?”

“If you’re immune, and _I’m_ immune, then that has to mean—”

Hanna’s train of thought ends there, her body immediately tensing up at the sound of the door clicking open. All the breath knocks out of Ellie and she feels ready for the ground to crack under her as Abby steps into the room.

She blinks at Ellie in surprise, like she didn’t expect to see her there, like maybe she didn’t _want_ to see Ellie there, before looking at Hanna and shifting her gaze to Lev. “Kid asleep?”

“No,” Lev answers and Hanna sits up in surprise. He flutters his eyes open, focused on Hanna with a look that’s a mixture of sheepishness and embarrassment. “I didn’t want to interrupt you,” he apologizes quietly. “What you were saying was important.”

Ellie faintly notices that blush that crosses Hanna’s cheeks, and she combs a loose braid behind her ear. “You could have had your eyes open, you dope.”

Now it’s Lev who is blushing, and Abby stares down at her boots like she’s interrupting something she shouldn’t be. Ellie pushes away from the wall with a start, drawing Abby’s attention back to her. “We should let them sleep,” Ellie forces her gaze not to travel to Abby, to look absolutely anywhere else, and she’s grateful to Hanna for being an unknowing diversion. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Hanna says, albeit reluctantly, and sits up from the bed. She gives Lev a small smile and mouths him a goodnight before turning to Abby. “See you in the morning,” she hums, and then she’s brushing past her and out the door.

Abby’s gaze finds Ellie, and Ellie is back on that beach, one of Abby’s hands wandering under the hem of Ellie’s shirt and tracing some of the scars that _she_ left her while the other is pinning them down into the sand. She looks away just as quickly. “Night,” she mutters, before sliding past Abby and following Hanna out into the hall.

If Abby says anything after the fact, Ellie chooses not to hear her.

* * *

Hanna is fast asleep, resting like the world isn’t ending more and more every single day, and Ellie envies her for that from where she sits wide awake on the bed across from her. She doesn’t know how long it’s been since they got back to the room, but she knows that she’s filled three journal pages already and is working her way to a fourth.

She notices, quickly wishing she _didn’t_ notice, that since she met up with Abby and Lev in Las Vegas, nearly every one of her pages has at least one sketched braid on it. Abby doesn’t even have the _hair_ for a braid anymore, so why the fuck can’t Ellie get it out of her mind? Why did she drag her fingers into Abby’s hair tonight and wonder what it would have been like to tug on it when it had been long?

Sometimes, it’s not braids. Sometimes, it’s a wolf’s head on a very familiar woman’s body. One time in New Mexico, Ellie had found herself hyper-focused on Abby’s fingers drumming a terribly off-rhythm beat. There are six outlines and sketches of hands littering an entire two-page section of her journal and the realization makes her stomach churn.

She blames it on being with Abby and Lev day in and day out. She blames it on the fact that Dina can say she loves her all she wants, but that deep down Ellie knows that she doesn’t deserve that love anymore.

Frustrated, Ellie closes her journal in shame. And that’s when she sees it, falling out from between the pages. The Texas quarter she picked up what feels like months ago.

She pinches it between her fingers, letting it dance and weave between her knuckles. What is Abby’s fucking fascination with these things, anyway? And why is Ellie still holding onto it?

She needs to give it to her. Needs to get rid of it.

After all, it is merely one more thing that will never, ever belong to her.

* * *

Her plan is simple. She’ll slip it under the door to Abby and Lev’s room, and maybe Lev will pick it up and show it to Abby like it’s all just some brilliant, unexpected coincidence. Like fate brought the quarter to her, like fate doesn’t run synonymous with Ellie.

As it turns out, this plan falls apart nearly as soon as its set into motion.

Ellie is making her way down the hall after quietly clicking the door shut behind a sleeping Hanna. She heads to Abby’s door, crouching down to slide the quarter under the crack at the foot of the door and call it a night, call it good riddance once and for all.

And that’s when the door clicks open and Ellie finds herself toppling backwards, landing on her ass in surprise. “Jesus Christ,” she gasps out, startled, before seeing the unmistakable frame standing in front of her.

“Sorry,” Abby’s voice is quiet, short, and Ellie has never, ever wanted to abort a mission so fast in her entire life. She turns her head in surprise a beat later, looking at Ellie with her brows furrowed. “What are you doing?”

"Tying my shoe,” Ellie blurts out.

Abby’s eyebrows raise, not believing the lie for a second, and she crosses her arms over her chest. “In front of my door?”

Fuck her and her fucking _logic_.

“Not that it matters, but I just…” she sheepishly offers the quarter out to Abby. “I found this and I don’t need it, so.”

Abby looks down, gaze softening and lips parting just enough that it makes Ellie look away. “A Texas quarter,” she breathes out, flipping it knuckle to knuckle. “Thanks.”

Ellie shrugs it off – or tries to, at least. “It’s whatever,” she says absentmindedly. “I don’t get what your whole hang-up with them is, but… didn’t know if you had that one yet.”

“I have _a_ Texas quarter,” Abby points out. “But not this one, not this year. Not _from_ Texas.” She looks at it for another elongated moment before slipping her hand into her back pocket and pulling out a small satchel that Ellie isn’t sure she’s ever paid enough attention to before. Abby tucks the coin inside and tugs on the chewed up drawstring to close it back up. Her eyes lift, focusing on Ellie, and for a moment, she doesn’t say anything. But then she does. “My dad collected them,” she says quietly. “So, everywhere we went, I’d find quarters for him, and he’d add them to his collection.” She scuffs the toe of her boot along the ragged hallway carpeting. “After I lost him, I kept the collection going for myself. Still missing a couple, and have a shit-ton of duplicates, but I’m not gonna stop ‘til I get all fifty states. That’s what his goal was.”

Ellie feels a tight twist in her gut at the words, at the sincerity laced behind them, and all she can do is nod. “That’s really cool,” she says quietly. “I, uh… Joel used to always grab me comics, when I first met him. Now I grab trading cards to kinda... keep the tradition alive somehow, I guess.”

Abby doesn’t say anything at first, but when she does, it’s a soft, “Right.”

Ellie is about to bite a whole clear through her bottom lip. She looks down at her feet, at the tattered carpet, at seam of the wall where the wallpaper is curling up. She is not looking at Abby, and that is probably for the best. “How many states do you have left?”

“Nine.”

“Your little bag’s gonna be really heavy.”

Abby snorts, picking her bag up again and tossing it from hand to hand. “I switch the bags out,” she tells her. “Keep the rest in my pack.”

“That does…not seem practical.”

"Nothing we do is practical, Ellie.” Abby’s voice is soft, deliberate, and Ellie hates herself for hearing Abby’s voice raspy and thick against the waves lapping along the coastline. _Ellie_ , she’d said, _I will never see what you see._ “Besides,” Abby continues, and Ellie is (thankfully) pulled from the thick of her fog, at least for now, “once we find a place to actually call home around here, I’ll find a place to keep my coins.”

For some reason – and, in hindsight, it should be obvious – this catches Ellie off-guard. “You’re staying here?”

Abby looks at Ellie like she’s sprouted a second head. “Yes?” She laughs, but it’s a laugh of confusion, of discomfort, not of humor. “Ellie, that’s the whole reason we’re _here_. This is why we _came_.”

Abby and Lev had their mission, and Ellie had hers.

“Right,” Ellie says softly, taking a small step backwards, away from Abby, away from her door, further back against the wall. “No, yeah. I know that.”

“Just like you came here on a one-woman mission to—”

“—I said I know, Abby.”

Ellie doesn’t know why her voice comes off sounding so _tired_. Tired of this conversation, tired of running, tired of fucking _existing_ and fighting and living and arguing.

She knows what Abby’s tongue tastes like between her teeth, against the roof of her mouth. She knows how it feels to have the tips of her fingers trace her bare skin. She wishes she’d never learned any of that. One look at Abby tells her that she’s probably thinking the same thing – assuming she’s thinking about it at all.

As if Ellie cares if she’s thinking about it.

“I’m going to bed,” Abby says, but Abby doesn’t sound tired. She doesn’t even sound exhausted. 

She just sounds done.

* * *

Ellie doesn’t sleep. Instead, she stays staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, feeling her pulse thrumming in her veins, hearing her heart pounding in her ears. What if this is the last night? What if this is _it_? No more pulse, or heartbeat. No anger, no heartache, no mourning. Just a void. Empty. Done. Over.

She tries to think back to what she would have done – really and truly – if she had known what was going to happen at the hospital with the Fireflies. Would she have really been okay with sacrificing herself like that?

It brings her back to a conversation with Joel, back when they’d first met, back before she had known how truly heavy the world could be. There had been destruction in Pittsburgh – streets filled with abandoned vehicles and bullet casings, and Ellie hadn’t known why. 

_“You can’t let everyone in,”_ Joel had told her.

A beat had passed, Ellie staring around the torn-apart streets with a hollow ache in her chest. _“You sacrifice the few to save the many,”_ Joel continued.

It gave Ellie pause, and she swallowed a lump before it threatened to form fully in her throat. _“That’s kind of shitty.”_

Was it shitty? She, who was willing to sacrifice herself to save everyone else just to give herself some falsified sense of purpose in the world? Was _that_ shitty?

She blinks, rubbing at her eyes until she’s digging holes into her face with her fists, before she’s rolling back out of bed. She grabs her guitar and her journal, and she checks over her shoulder, careful to not wake Hanna. Then, she’s back in that same hallway all over again.

Pacing the halls, she passes Abby and Lev’s door and keeps going. She opts for the emergency stairwell over the elevator, letting her feet drag her further and further down. She doesn’t know what time it is, but the bright-white of the moon and the hum of the salt air is causing a fog across the Galveston bay as she makes her way outside.

Had it really been earlier _this evening_ that Abby had made that off-handed joke about how the two of them and beaches didn’t mix? She heads across the sand anyway, dropping down in front of a bent palm tree and placing her guitar in her lap. She plucks absentmindedly, fingers clumsily stumbling over each other as they try to gain their footing.

The words to the painfully familiar Pearl Jam song slip past her lips like a secret, as soft as the strumming, and she wonders – and wonders, and wonders, and wonders – if she’ll ever know what it feels like to make a smart decision.

She plays softly, plucking and strumming the chords that she knows as well as her own heartbeat. She plays for Lev and for Hanna, she plays for Joel, she plays for Dina and JJ, for Jesse, for Tommy, for Tess and Riley and Marlene, and for fucking _Abby_. 

She plays until the strings are digging into her fingers, cutting through calloused skin and leaving her feeling raw, and pathetic, and alive.

* * *

She doesn’t know what time it is when she stumbles back into the hotel room, all she knows is that she’s sleepless – and remains sleepless – until the sun is beginning to peek in at them through the curtains. She lays still, keeping her eyes trained on the ceiling. She waits until she sees Hanna stirring from the corner of her eye, and that’s when she finally sits up.

“We should go to the beach today,” Hanna says lightly, stretching out like a cat in a window. “I think it could be really nice to feel kind of normal for a change.”

Ellie wants to agree with her, but she knows that she has much bigger plans laying ahead of her today. She knows that the only thing the beach is good for right now is making her think about what happened on the beach the night before, and that is the very, very last thing that she wants to concern herself with.

“I have to meet up with Graham,” Ellie counters, rolling her shoulders and massaging her temples, trying to force the permanent headache out of her.

Hanna goes still beside her. “Oh.”

For a minute, nothing is said between them. But then – but then – Hanna speaks up.

“I can come with you,” she offers.

Ellie blanches, blinking back at her in confusion. “You don’t need to do that.,”

“I know you’re having a hard time believing it,” Hanna’s voice almost comes across as teasing, “but you’re not the only one that’s immune around here. I think it would help if I talked to him, too.” Before Ellie can rebuttal, Hanna is cutting her off. “I want to talk to him.”

“He doesn’t need to know you’re immune, Hanna.”

Hanna scoffs, pushing herself up out of the bed. “Oh, he’s _going_ to know.”

* * *

Ellie realizes, however painfully and begrudgingly, that Hanna doesn’t budge when she sets her mind on something. She should have realized that before, when Hanna had declared to her dad that she wanted to go to Galveston with a group of strangers when she’d never, ever before left the four walls that surrounded her hometown. And yet, it still surprised her.

“I just don’t want you to do this alone,” Hanna tells her. Ellie wants to tell her that she’s used to doing things alone, that she _prefers_ doing them alone, but she doesn’t think it would make much of a difference.

She’s debating arguing with her further on this when they run into Abby and Lev out in the hallway. Abby’s gaze settles on Ellie for one, two, _too_ many seconds, before she’s looking over at Lev. “We should go.”

Lev looks over at Hanna, a timid smile at his lips. “Did you want to go eat breakfast?” he asks her.

Hanna seeks permission in the form of glancing over at Ellie. “You won’t leave before we’re done, right?” she asks.

Lev’s eyebrow lifts in curiosity. “Where are you going?” he asks.

Abby’s eyes are practically searing a hole into Ellie’s skull. Because she knows. Because of course she knows. “So, this is it?”

“Do we have to do this now?”

“Yeah, no, you’re right. I’ll just catch up with you later in the morgue.”

Ellie swallows the lump that’s threatening to form in her throat, pushing it down, down, down. “I don’t know what you fucking _want_ from me here.”

“Nothing,” Abby counters. “I don’t want anything.”

Lev’s gaze volleys between Abby and Ellie, slowly, back and forth, before settling back on Ellie. It’s a flicker of recognition, it’s enough to make Ellie want to rip her own throat out. “The doctors,” he says softly. “You’re going to go meet with the doctors.” Lev is only winding up from there, his look traveling over to Hanna, who shrinks beside him, and then back to Ellie. “Are you…you’re taking Hanna with you?”

“ _No_ ,” Ellie argues, at the same time that Hanna says, “I’m going with her.”

Lev’s jaw drops, whipping around to face Hanna. “ _Why_ would you _do that_?”

“I don’t want her going alone.”

“I don’t need a fucking _guardian—_ ”

“—Hanna, Ellie wants to…” Lev’s words die on his tongue, and he looks back at Ellie in disbelief. “Would you have even said _goodbye_ if you hadn’t run into us?” he asks her, and he looks at her like he’s seeing her for the very first time. “Would you have said _anything_? Or would you have just fucking left?”

It’s Abby who’s speaking up before Ellie has the chance. “Kid—”

“— _no,_ ” Lev argues, and his voice crackles with the word. His eyes are focused solely on Ellie. “Why would you still _go_?” he asks. “It doesn’t even make sense. You’re just going to go…you’re going to _let them—_ ”

Ellie holds up a hand to stop him. She doesn’t want to meet his gaze, certainly doesn’t want to meet Abby’s. “I’m doing what I have to do,” she tells him, as if that’s that, as if everything can just go from here as normal. “And that’s why I wasn’t going to say anything. Because I didn’t want _this—_ ”

“—it’s not _about you_!” Lev cries. A few guards pause in the middle of the lobby to look at them, and Lev waves them away with his hand. “We’re _talking here_ ,” he spits at them, but then he’s looking back at Ellie. She has seen Lev mad before – angry and furious even – but this is something new. Different. Bigger. Lev isn’t only mad, he’s afraid. The fear is dripping through his voice like venom, falling in droplets on the floor beneath them. “It’s not about _you_ anymore, Ellie. I know that you like to act like you don’t have anybody, like… like it’s just you versus the fucking universe, but it’s _not_. You are not the only one here. You don’t get to go _kill yourself_ to try and make yourself feel better. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Lev—”

Lev’s body rattles with his words. “You’re not the only one who’s even _immune_ , Ellie,” he says, voice shaking. “Hanna is immune, too. So, what? You guys are just going to go meet up with some doctors and let them take _both of you_?” He curls his fingers into his wrist, and Ellie realizes that it’s to try and stop them from shaking. Because that’s what he does every time he gets fired up, every time he gets scared – but never once has _she_ been the focus of his anger, of his agony. “No,” he shakes his head. “No, you don’t get to do that. And I know that you think Joel took away your right to decide, but you _can’t do this_.” His fingers wind around each other until they’re in a knot. “I can’t lose you, too.”

Hanna’s eyes are fixed solely on her shoes, and Abby – in a shocking turn of events – seems to have been rendered completely speechless. It’s like the entire lobby has faded – no, _shattered_ _like sea glass_ – around them. The lobby is nothing more than Ellie and a shaking, furious Lev.

“You can’t think this doesn’t _mean_ something,” Lev continues, pointing between Hanna and Ellie and back again. “This. Meeting her. Finding her. It means _everything_ , Ellie.”

Out of a nervous habit, one of Ellie’s arms crosses her chest to hold onto her elbow, squeezing and swallowing hard. She wants to be able to avert her gaze, but she can’t do that. She knows the gravity of how incredibly unfair that would be.

Because she’s been here before. Different people in a different situation, but she’s stood in this very spot. She’s stood on both sides of it.

Once, when Joel told her the truth about what had really happened in Salt Lake City. When he confessed to her the truth and it broke her. She’d been in Lev’s shoes, shaking hands and trembling wrists and wobbly knees and begging, begging, _begging_ for it to all be nothing more than a hoax. A cruel joke. She would be furious at him and he would so pay for it later, but at least she would know that he hadn’t been harboring a lie for so long. But, of course, that hadn’t been the case. And, of course, she had known that that _wouldn’t_ be the case. She wasn’t an idiot, after all. She had been able to tell that something – no, everything – was off from the moment she woke up in the back of that truck. He had told her that it had been because there were so many people that were immune that they just didn’t _need_ her, and the wrongness of his words had imbedded itself into her skin like a screw.

She knew Lev’s anger. She knew his feeling of betrayal, because she had once been him. Sometimes, she was convinced that she still _was_ him.

His anger wasn’t unfamiliar to her. The hurt that flickered in his dark eyes anything but foreign. She’d seen the same look mirrored in the eyes of the woman that she’d once – perhaps still – loved so incredibly deeply as Ellie removed herself from her life. As Ellie made the decision to walk away, to chase after the one black cloud from which she could never escape. The same black cloud that was standing across from her right now, a world away from the beach that they had once made their battleground.

Dina had pleaded with her, had told her in not quite the same words that the decision wasn’t hers to make, not anymore. And she hadn’t listened.

She still wasn’t listening.

“I’m sorry, Lev,” Ellie tells him, feeling the words all the way into her marrow. “I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Lev counters. “ _No.”_ A long moment is still and quiet and awful between them before he spits out one final, “Fuck you, Ellie,” and turns on his heel, striding into stairwell and letting the door slam behind him.

Ellie watches him, and she is back in the woods, and she is back with Joel. It always, always comes back to goddamn Joel Miller.

 _“I’ll go back,”_ Ellie had rattled out after his confession, struggling to find her voice within the fog that had begun to swell around her, _“But we’re done.”_

Lev’s words would haunt her.

And yet, it is Abby who she turns back to. Abby’s gaze is fixed on the door, only catching Ellie in her periphery for a moment. 

“You should go,” is all she says, and it’s rigid and quiet, and somehow hurts just as bad.

* * *

Ellie and Hanna skip breakfast in favor of heading out into Galveston, and Hanna looks at all the surrounding buildings and outposts, squinting against the Texas sunlight overhead. “Where did he say he wanted you to meet him?” she asks.

“Hanna, go back inside—”

“—sorry, where?”

“You’re fucking annoying, you know that?”

Hanna smiles, like this is all amusing, and peers up at the large, glass pyramids as they pass them by. “I bet this place was real pretty back then,” she says softly, wistfully. It’s the most that she’s said since they left the hotel. Ellie would be lying if she said that she hadn’t tried to catch a glimpse of Lev and Abby on the way out of the lobby, but something told her that she had decided to skip breakfast as well. It was a hollow, ugly feeling – the realization that she’d hurt him, the fact that it was something she was just going to somehow have to live with.

For now, at least. But, it wouldn’t be much longer. As grim of a thought as that is.

She forces her mind to wander back to Hanna, who is looking up around them with the shadow of a smile curved at her lips. The morning sun is making her glow, and when she catches Ellie looking at her, she smiles timidly. Ellie wishes she knew what it felt like – what it felt like to be young, what it felt like to still be able to see the beauty in things that were gnarled and overgrown and decaying. 

“There’s an aquarium here,” Hanna carries on, and somehow, the word _“aquarium”_ sends Ellie’s body into an internalized fight-or-flight mode. “Lev told me that when y’all were back in Seattle, there was an aquarium. It’s this big place where fish—”

It is a flash, brief but blunt, and Ellie sees herself pulling away Mel’s coat and seeing the swell of her stomach, the blood drenching Ellie’s fingers. “I know what an aquarium is, Hanna.”

“Maybe we could go,” Hanna concludes.

“I don’t think they’d want to go.” Ellie picks up her pace like it’ll get her away from this conversation faster. 

After all, Lev will never want to go anywhere with her ever again.

…after all, she’ll likely never see Lev again.

They pass an old waterpark, green and red slides long abandoned, a wooden playhouse that is falling apart – the remnants of a long and winding swimming pool. Past the waterpark is the marina, and Graham is leaning against an old telephone pole, waiting for her – but not for them. That much, Ellie had determined, was crystal clear.

He looks at Hanna first, in curiosity, before smiling over at Ellie. “Morning. Glad you could make it,” he tells her. His head turns, eyes focusing on Hanna. “Hanna, right?”

“Yes, sir,” Hanna says with a nervous smile. She peers over at Ellie before returning her look back to Graham. “Didn’t want her walking over here all alone, y’know?”

Ellie scuffs the toe of her shoe along the valley where the wood of the dock meets the sand of the beach. “Ready to head to the lab whenever you are.” She turns back to look at Hanna. “You can go, Hanna. You don’t need to stick around.”

“No, I’m going,” Hanna argues, insistent.

Graham blinks between the two of them for a moment before nodding the two forward, down the pier to where his boat is docked. Before they can make it the rest of the way, Hanna’s fingers are circling Ellie’s wrist.

Christ.

Ellie turns to look at her. “Hanna, _what is it_?”

Hanna sucks in a shaky breath, and she looks back over her shoulder, at where the faded pink hotel stands in the distance. “Just… if this is, like, the end of the line…” the words seem jumbled on her tongue. “You didn’t say goodbye. To Lev or to Abby, and—”

There’s a knot in Ellie’s stomach.

_Fuck you, Ellie. Fuck you, Ellie. Fuck you, Ellie. **Fuck. You. Ellie.**_

“No, Hanna,” Ellie says, voice soft and weaker than she’d care to admit. “I think that _was_ goodbye.”

Hanna’s face crumpled after a moment, and Ellie could see her trying to restore it. “No, it wasn’t.” She crosses her arms over her chest and her gaze, once again, is turned and fixed on the hotel behind them. “Ellie, it _can’t_ be.” She sniffs, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “You can’t leave things like that.”

Graham watches the two of them, an unspoken question in his eyes. And yet, he speaks up. “We gotta travel across the bayou to get the hospitals. They’re not _quite_ on the other side of the island; but, they’re still a ways that way,” he gestures a hand across the horizon of the water. “Got some units posted up there.”

“Are they expecting me?”

Ellie doesn’t know which answer worries her more.

“No.”

Hanna’s eyes are nearly burning a hole into her, and Ellie can’t make another step closer toward the boat before Hanna is pulling her back again. The force of her grip actually catches Ellie off-guard, losing her balance for a moment and staggering backwards. “Jesus, Hanna, _what_?”

“You can’t just go and _die_ without saying goodbye to the people you care about.”

Ellie feels like an idiot for even humoring the situation, for dragging it out any further than it already has been. And yet, she finds herself turning to Graham. “Can you just give us a moment?”

Graham, however, shakes his head. He doesn’t look upset, just confused. “Why don’t you two come with me to the lab?” he asks her, speaking carefully and treading lightly, like he’s stepping over trip wires. “I think we can talk there.” He gestures to Hanna. “Please.”

Hanna swallows hard, and Ellie knows that she doesn’t want to, but she nods anyway.

* * *

It is a silent boat ride, nothing but the eerily calm rustling of water and wind. Hanna is watching the world go past her with that same wonder and amazement in her eyes that she always carries. No matter what happens, no matter how this “talk” at the lab ends, she knows that it can’t end with Hanna anywhere other than right back with Abby and Lev. Even if all they do is take her back to Lago Vista, the last place she deserves to be is strapped to an operating table with a needle sticking out of her arm and a mask over her face.

Somewhere inside of Ellie exists a rational side, a side that tries to tell her that this must have been how Joel felt. At least, a little. She and Hanna haven’t had the time to form the kind of bond Ellie had formed with Joel, they haven’t been in near as many “make it or break it” situations, but she cared about her fiercely. She saw so many small aspects and details of herself within Hanna, within Lev, within these young, innocent people that had somehow been brought into her life through one mean or another.

The other side of her, didn’t see things this way. They saw her as right and Joel as wrong for the choice that he had made for her, taken from her. Even if she had decided not to go through with the operation, it should have been _her_ decision to make.

A small detail that she had never really let herself digest was the Marlene of it all. Even if she had never asked Joel about the specifics, and Joel had never offered them to her, she knew that the truth of the matter wasn’t that Marlene was still out there looking for her, tracking her down. She knew that Marlene had been another choice that Joel had made.

 _“I’d fucking rip cities apart to keep him safe,”_ Abby had said about Lev one night, when they had been staring up at the night sky. _“I’d burn everything down.”_

_“He’s my family.”_

_Fuck you, Ellie._

* * *

The hospital, for the most part, is still kept together. The most damage that it looks like it has taken is the storms it has weathered over the past few decades. Windows are boarded up, some of the walls are caved in, but Graham leads Ellie and Hanna through the plastic tents and into the lobby.

“The labs are this way,” he tells them, nodding the two of them toward the doorway that reads EMERGENCY STAIRWELL. Hanna hasn’t spoken since they got on the boat, and it makes the knot in Ellie’s stomach tighten even more.

They head up two flights of stairs and into a new hallway, and Ellie thinks back to Nora. Thinks back to the anger she had taken out on her and how sick she’d felt afterwards. Dina had stayed with her until she fell asleep, but the moment she felt her hand leave her shoulder, she’d thrown herself across the room and retched into a bucket on the dressing room floor. She couldn’t hide from Nora’s face, from what she’d done, from the fact that she had so desperately _wanted_ to do it, to make her feel the pain that she felt.

Abby didn’t talk about Nora a lot. Abby didn’t talk about any of them, really. The only one she occasionally allowed herself to bring up was Manny, and Ellie’s pretty sure that’s only because Abby knows that Manny had died at the hands of Tommy, and not Ellie. But from the few words that Abby has shared about Nora, and from the pictures that she’s seen of Abby and Nora, she knows how close they were. Ellie knew Abby still had to hate her for everyone she had taken from her – if she knew about Nora, would that be the final nail in the coffin?

Christ, did it even _matter_ at this point.

She catches Hanna out of the corner of her eye, following the paths of bloodied gurneys and open rooms with knocked over carts and empty beds. Hanna is grimacing, shrinking into herself, and Ellie reaches for her hand and laces their fingers together. _No matter what_ , Ellie vows to herself, _you will not be in this place._

Graham is approaching the door at the end of the hall, and Hanna tightly grips Ellie’s hand to keep her from moving forward the rest of the way. “Ellie, I just…”

With his hand paused on the door handle, Graham lets out a small sigh, and Ellie feels like she can see the gears turning in his head, mulling over his next move. “I’ll let you talk,” he finally says. “I gotta get a few things set up in here anyway. Come in when you’re ready.”

Ellie watches him leave, partly to keep her eyes away from Hanna and partly out of a morbid and harrowing curiosity to know that lies beyond the door. It’s the small pull of Hanna’s hand, the clearing of her throat, that sends Ellie’s gaze back to her.

“I don’t know a lot about… Joel,” she says after a moment. “I know he was important to you. I know that he made a decision for you that really hurt you. But I think he did what he did out of love.”

It takes a pile of bricks to push Ellie’s words past her lips. “I know that.”

“I think…” Hanna fidgets with her free fingers, swaying back on her heels before facing forward. “I think Lev was right when he said that we all… that it all meant something. Us meeting. Not that it’s the universe telling you this isn’t something you should do, but more that…” Hanna is shaking her head, pulling her other hand away from Ellie just so she can fold her own hands together in front of her. She doesn’t remember a lot of aspects of her childhood, but she does remember a girl in one of her group homes making a similar shape with her own hands.

_Here is the church; here is the steeple…_

“…more that we all needed something or someone, and maybe we all found that with each other. I never _ever_ would have known about… _this part of me_ without you.”

“Yeah,” Ellie scoffs, “exactly—”

“—Ellie, I don’t feel trapped in my body over it. I don’t hate myself for it. It makes every time that I’ve felt different in my whole life feel like it makes sense now. Because I _am_ different. And you’re different. And we can help other people, and…” she shakes her head, releasing her fingers from where they are folded around each other so that she can wipe at the back of her eyes. “I don’t know,” she says decisively, softly. “Just. Thank you, I guess. For bringing me with you. For letting me _meet_ myself. Because that wouldn’t have happened without you, without Abby and Lev. It’s… it’s probably stupid, but it’s like, I don’t have the family that I grew up with right now. But I _have_ family. You know?” She sniffs, crossing her arms tightly around herself like a vice. “I have you.”

Ellie breathes out shakily, and she wants to find the words to reply. To say something, to say anything. But nothing can come out. Nothing feels right, nothing feels like _enough_.

Before she can find a word, Hanna is nodding toward the lab door. “You should go in there.”

“Yeah,” Ellie says after a moment. “We should.”

Hanna’s eyes light up, the ghost of a smile finding its way back across the curve of her mouth as Ellie opens the door and leads them inside.

Ellie doesn’t know what she expected. She doesn’t know if she expected to see operating tables and test tubes and oxygen masks waiting for her. But none of that is there. Instead, there is a desk, and light-up boxes lining the walls, lighting up the x-rays framed inside of them.

She’s seen cordyceps infections before, she’s seen how they can spread, how they can impact the brain before slowly, and surely, attacking the rest of the body. But these x-rays seemed different than the ones that she had seen before. The infection wasn’t as in-bloom, but rather more contained, little divots and valleys within the skull, a cloudy, contained mass.

“What am I looking at?” Ellie asks

Graham sighs, stepping around the table and moving to the first set of x-rays. He trails his finger along the source of the infection. “This is Javi. Got bit in ’29. Found him a couple years’ back in a town in Louisiana – never turned.” Something inside of Ellie collapsed in on itself, and Hanna reached out to her like a life raft, squeezing her shoulder. “Probably would’ve gone through with the procedure when we got him back here, but that was when we found Michelle.” He moves to the next set of x-rays. “She doesn’t remember when she got bit – just knows nothing ever came from it.”

Ellie swallowed rigidly, everything in her body inflating so, so tightly. She was afraid to exhale, afraid to look for any source of light at the end of the tunnel. 

“It wasn’t until we found Nelson,” he points to the final set of x-rays, “that we knew this wasn’t going to be the cut and dry operation that we thought it would be.” He steps away from the x-rays, stepping closer to Ellie. “Years back, we had tried and failed at procedures on patients – patients that came before you.”

Ellie swallows the stone forming in her throat. “What do you mean?”

“It was _never_ just you, Ellie,” Graham says softly, like he’s saying a prayer before bed. “And with Miss Hanna, we know it’s nowhere _close_ to just you.” He gestures behind himself, to the wall of x-rays behind him. There are more, more, more – so many more than the three he showed her. They are wallpaper.

“From what we’ve been able to determine,” Graham carries on, and Ellie feels her knees giving out from beneath her but she forces herself to hold on and stay afloat, “there is more than just one strain of this virus. And some of them are inoperable without death being the ultimate side effect. And we don’t want that. A lot of them are kids – that’s what else we’ve discovered. Majority of our patients were bit between the ages of eleven and sixteen.”

He maneuvers to a drawer behind the table, pulling out a yellow folder that she can see, even with faded writing, reads _WILLIAMS, ELLIE._ _CASE-STUDY 006._ “I’ve read your file,” he tells her. “A lot, actually. I’ve studied it. You have Strain B, and Strain B doesn’t require as invasive of a procedure.” He pauses for a second and Ellie waits for the floor to swallow her whole. “In fact, it doesn’t require a procedure at all. It just requires a couple blood samples, swabs, and hair follicles.”

“What?”

"Ellie, we can make a vaccine,” Graham tells her. “Because it’s not just you. It’s not just you and it’s not just Hanna and Javi and Michelle and Nelson. We have labs studying this in Boston and Chicago and Minnesota for Christ’s sake. All we need is enough samples of the virus to form a viable, testable vaccine.”

There has to be something he’s not telling her. There has to be a catch. There has to be something that she’s missing. The floor is still going to collapse out from under her, this is still the decision that she has to make, that she’s always had to make – and now is finally her chance.

“I want to _help_ ,” Ellie finds herself declaring.

“And I want your help,” Graham tells her. “No, actually. I _need_ your help. Just not in the way that maybe the Fireflies once thought we would.” He gestures back to the x-rays, and then he is looking back at her and meeting her gaze once more. “You don’t have to give your life for this, Ellie. And if we can get enough samples, nobody will ever have to give their life for this again.”

Ellie inhales sharply, knives poking into her chest cavity, and she looks at the x-rays shining back at her. “Where are they?”

“Everywhere,” Graham tells her. “We initially wanted to set up immunity centers in all the major cities where our hospitals are, but people see immunity as a threat. As something that needs to be taken out, eradicated. So we have to get the patients from Point A to Point B so that we can get the samples taken and take the steps necessary to begin creating and administering the vaccine.”

Despite herself, Ellie catches herself snorting. Maybe she is finally succumbing to her delirium after all this time. Maybe this is the full-circle moment she never, ever imagined asking for. “Like smuggling.”

"Yeah,” Graham affirms with a nod. “Like smuggling.”

* * *

Morning sun has shifted to afternoon heat as Graham’s boat lumbers back to the dock of Moody Gardens. The faded pink hotel is in the distance, and Ellie’s hands are shaking in her lap. Beside her, Hanna is a lit-up Christmas tree.

“Meet me tonight outside the hotel,” Graham tells her. “We’ll have your ride ready, a siphon hose for the trip, files on who you’re looking for – anything else you might need.”

Ellie’s nod is small but affirmative, her insides buzzing, humming against her bones as they make their way across the pier and back up along the path that winds back to the hotel. She’s peering over her shoulder at Hanna, much more apprehensive than she would ever want to appear. “Do you think they left?”

"No,” Hanna says this like it’s obvious, like Ellie should know better.

Lev’s words are still echoing through the chambers of her mind, and she straightens her stance, tries to walk with her head held high. It was something that Riley had taught her another lifetime ago. She could be badass if she walked like a badass. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t _actually_ hardcore, because what people really looked for was the way that you carried yourself.

Those are the memories that Ellie prefers to hold onto when it comes to Riley. Those ones are better – so much fucking better – than the alternatives, than the glimpses and flashbacks and echoes of her that always threaten to bubble back up to the surface when she can’t sleep at night.

They approach the hotel, and Hanna is a steady fixture at Ellie’s side, wise beyond her years and safely holding her hand in hers. “I know it might not be the right time,” she says softly as they wander past the crowd standing in the entryway, “but is it true that Abby bit off two of your fingers?”

Ellie can’t help it. She laughs. It starts small, more of a sigh than anything else, but it quickly morphs into full-blown laughter. Maybe it really is the hysteria, maybe she’s tired of pretending that anything in her life is even close to fucking normal. “Yeah,” she finally says, waving her other hand back at Hanna so that she can see the knobs above her knuckles. “She did.”

* * *

It’s Lev that they find first, and the coward in Ellie wants to turn and walk in the opposite direction. She doesn’t. She keeps her head up, she takes the remaining steps that separate the two of them. He is sitting on a chair with his legs folded in front of him – and in his lap is a copy of _Savage Starlight._

“That’s a good one,” Ellie breathes out, crouching down against the arm of the chair and meeting his gaze before he can jump away.

His eyes widen, gaze fixed on Ellie before traveling up to Hanna and back. “What are you doing here?” he asks. The venom that laced his voice just this morning has subsided, replaced with a hesitance that Ellie can’t hold against him. “Shouldn’t you be…” he trails off, shakes his head and looks back down at the comic that he must have swiped from Ellie’s bag when she wasn’t looking.

She doesn’t care. She will give him every single comic she can get her hands on. She will give him everything.

“Yeah, about that,” she says softly, raising her eyebrows back at him as if she’s about to issue a challenge. “It turns out, there’s a lot more to the story than I thought.” She glances over her shoulder at Hanna, before she’s looking back at Lev. “In fact, I’m not quite sure my work here is done. Y’know?”

“No,” he says honestly. “I don’t know.”

“Lev,” it is Hanna who is speaking up, moving to the open chair beside him and sitting down. “There are so many people that are immune. And Graham wants us to find them, to… to _help_ them. To help make the vaccine. _Us_. He wants _us_ to do that.” She pauses after a second, shooting Ellie a sheepish look. “I mean, he wants _her_ to do it, really, but she said I could come, too.”

“You all can,” Ellie backs her up. “I mean. What was it that you said earlier? We’re a team?”

Lev looks between the two of them, blinking away tears that she can tell are swelling up in the corners of his eyes. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “We’re a team.”

“What’s going on?”

Ellie turns, insides turning outward as she sees Abby in the doorway. While Lev may have eased up on his anger toward Ellie, it looks like Abby began to carry the load in his stead. She shoots Ellie a surprised look, gaze traveling between the trio in front of her. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to ask a favor,” Ellie says, pushing up on the arm of her chair with her hands so that she can stand once more. She steps closer to her. “Turns out Graham’s got something in mind. Might require a driver or two.”

Abby scoffs, which is somehow a better answer than Ellie anticipated.

"And what?” Abby chides. “You think we’re just gonna go along with whatever fucking plan you’ve got thought up?” She shakes her head, arms opening enough that she can show off where they are currently standing, providing Ellie with a visual she doesn’t need. For a moment, Ellie’s gaze is fixed on the lines and curves of Abby’s arms, but she quickly blinks away, steering her vision back to Abby. “This _was_ my end goal, Ellie,” she tells her. “Even if it wasn’t yours. Even if… you’ve changed your mind, or whatever. I haven’t.” She looks at Lev pointedly, a silent statement, before she’s back on Ellie. “ _We_ haven’t.”

“Bullshit,” Ellie argues.

Abby blanches back at her, eyes narrowing. “Excuse me?”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” she repeats herself. Somehow, the words are escaping her faster than her mind can come up with them. “When this whole fucking… thing started? I wanted an out. I wanted any out I could get. I didn’t want to fucking be here, be around you or… I didn’t want to _think_ about what had happened. I didn’t want to face it; I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to forget I knew you. I didn’t want to remember.” Her hands shake at her sides, and she folds them together to keep steady. “But the thing is, I don’t think I ever knew you to begin with. I don’t think you ever knew me. And that’s fucking _fine_ , because we don’t have to know each other, or like each other. We don’t. But that doesn’t mean that…”

Her words failed her for a moment, looking down at her feet before forcing her gaze back up. “It doesn’t mean that this doesn’t work,” she admits, resigns, the words falling like weights off her shoulders. She looks over to Lev, gestures a hand to Hanna, and then her gaze is back on Abby, who is pouring her eyes right back into her. “ _We_ work. Whatever the fuck this is, who-whoever the fuck _we_ are. You know?” She laughs, no humor to her tone, and shakes her head. “Isn’t that fucking stupid? _We work_. Jesus.” 

The last words are more to herself than they are to anyone around her, but Abby still looks at her like she’s, perhaps, never looked at her before. Like she’s never seen her at all. Like this is the very first time.

And then, Abby makes the most “Abby” move of all.

“I get it,” she tells her, admits quietly. “But it’s not happening.”

She stays stubborn as a goddamn bull.

* * *

“It’s okay,” Hanna tells Ellie, as if Ellie has said literally anything since Abby’s fucking _rejection_. REJECTION. In the most Abby Anderson of all fucking fashions, Abby had told her that she was shit out of luck, that she and Lev weren’t going anywhere. Ellie hadn’t even really had a chance to tell her what her plan _was_ before she’d been shut down.

Every rational molecule in her body told her that this, of course, made sense. She and Abby weren’t friends. They weren’t teammates. They weren’t anything. It didn’t matter what had happened before – it _couldn’t_ matter what had happened before – because it shouldn’t have happened at all. Right?

I mean, obviously _right_.

The vehicle that Graham has bestowed upon them is a black SUV, much nicer than any of the vehicles that Ellie has driven in the past, and she finds herself caught off-guard that vehicles like this can still be _hanging in there_ after all this time. There are more CDs in the center console, the most heavy-duty siphon tool she’s ever seen taking residence in the very back of the vehicle. He tells her about the posts that she can stop at along the way that have “satellite devices” where she can keep in touch with all the different Firefly bases. It makes her wish (and it’s a thought she will forever keep locked away, only for herself) that Abby was there just to hear him say that.

She didn’t get the chance to tell Abby that there were so many more bases out there. That the world was so much bigger than they ever could have realized or anticipated.

“Take care out there,” Graham says as Ellie revs up the engine. Hanna has situated herself in the passenger seat, and Graham passes a few maps through the window. “I’ve marked the routes along the way,” he tells her. “Best places to find usable gas, places to sleep at night. This one here’ll take you up through Pittsburgh and into Boston and this one,” he taps on the other map, “cuts you into the Midwest.”

“Thanks,” she says with a small smile, tilting the map toward him as a form of acknowledgement. “For… all of it, really.”

“No,” he is quick to counter, shaking his head back at her. “Thank _you_.” He pauses for a second, smiling down at his shoes before looking back at her. “We’d all heard about this spitfire from Boston who made her way across the country and got found in the tunnels, we heard about how special she was. I just don’t know if any of us realized just _how_ special.”

She looks at the steering wheel to avoid his gaze. The memories of the tunnels under Salt Lake will never not feel like freshly bandaged and reopened wounds – at least, the memories that she has before everything goes dark under the water.

With a few parting words, Graham is making his way across the way, back into the front entrance of the hotel.

Ellie watches him go before turning back to Hanna, widening her eyes at her and raising her eyebrows. “You’re sure about this?” she asks her one last time. “You know you could stay here, with Abby and Lev. You could go back to Lago Vista. You could—”

“—Ellie,” Hanna holds up a hand to stop her. “I’m coming with you.”

Nearly taken aback, Ellie merely nods, reaching forward to once more fiddle with the radio. The opening synth waves of a song begin to echo through the speakers surrounding them when Hanna speaks up once more.

“Besides,” she says, and Ellie – even without meeting her gaze – can hear the smile in her voice. “I’d be all alone if I stayed here.”

Ellie’s brows furrow, and she looks back at her as she shifts into _drive_. “What are you talking about?”

Hanna nods forward, toward the entrance of the hotel, and Ellie’s foot jerks back down on the break nearly as fast as she steps off of it. Standing at the end of the walk-up are two familiar faces, packs slung over their shoulders.

It takes everything Ellie has in her to not crumble. It was humiliating enough getting personal with Abby once today, the last thing she was going to do was let her see that side of her fucking _twice_.

Abby shrugs back at her in defeat, but Lev is smiling wide, bounding forward. “You’ve got room, right?” he asks, and Hanna is already crawling out of the passenger side and into the backseat as he swings open the door to climb in beside her.

Abby, however, does not approach the passenger side in her place. Instead, she moves for the driver’s side. Moves for Ellie.

“Scoot over,” she says, pulling open the door before Ellie can even get the window rolled down.

“Excuse me?”

Abby merely nods her head to the vacant passenger seat beside her.

“We gotta face the facts here, Williams,” Abby tells her. “You’re a fucking awful driver.”

* * *

* * *

* * *

_**TO BE CONTINUED** _

* * *

* * *

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> feel free to yell at me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/soulmeetsbody) and [tumblr](http://summerskin.tumblr.com).
> 
> see ya soon ❤️

**Author's Note:**

> ♥ hello! this is my first time posting on here in THREE YEARS and it's all thanks to the last of us part ii and my inability to get any aspect of this game out of my head.
> 
> (( specifically, abby. cannot get abby out of my head. so if you don't like abby, just please do keep the negativity to yourself because it'll make me sad and i don't want to be more sad about this game than i already am! ))
> 
> with that being said, thank you so much for reading!  
> see u in the next chapter ♥


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